Modeling contractor and company employee behavior in high hazard operation

Abstract

The recent blow-out and subsequent environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico have highlighted a number of serious problems in scientific thinking about safety. Risk models have generally concentrated on technical failures, which are easier to model and for which there are more concrete data. However, many primary cause of the disasters, such as BP's Texas City and Deepwater Horizon, are rooted in management decisions and organizational. Therefore, there is a strong need to develop a risk management support tool for chemical process industries which incorporates human and organizational factors into quantified risk models. In this paper, we model two human performance model for oil and gas company Royal Dutch Shell. Interviews were conducted to obtain important human factors. As the quality and operation of the management actions have important influences on human factors (e.g. safety attitude, training), we have linked a safety management model with the human factors model and quantify the risk implications of different management changes to prevent accidents. The methodology of integrating organisational factors into a Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) model is discussed in Lin et al. (2012). In this paper the development and quantification of human and management factors for an international oil company is given.

Further development of a method to calculate frequencies of loss of control including their uncertainty

“…In Ale et al (2009 a, b) we described how the structure of the human behaviour model can be used to represent the various human actors involved in the operation. In the current implementation of the method we distinguish two types of people: the companies own personnel and the personnel hired through contractors (Lin et al 2013). This distinction has been made because personnel hired by contractors are under the managerial influence not only of Shell but also of the contractor company by which they are employed.…”