Risk-based design uses severity and occurrence of hazards to determine the overall system risk and prioritize the most important hazards. To fully understand potential risks and effectively mitigate them, the effects of component failures and human errors (acting alone and in tandem) need to be considered early in design, when sufficiently-quantified risks can be used to justify preventing them proactively. In previous work, the Human Error and Functional Failure Reasoning (HEFFR) framework was developed to model effects of human errors and component failures in a system, taking critical event scenarios as inputs and producing functional failures, human errors, and their propagation paths as outputs. With automated scenario generation, this framework can model millions of scenarios that cause system critical functions to fail. However, the outputs of this framework do not include any quantifiable measures to assess the risk of the hazards or identify worst-case fault scenarios. This work addresses these shortcomings by using a scenario probability and cost model to quantify the expected cost of failures in the HEFFR framework. A coolant tank case study is used to demonstrate this approach. While results show that the quantifiable measures enable HEFFR to identify worst-case scenarios, prioritize scenarios with the highest impact, and improve human-product interactions, the underlying likelihood and cost models are subject to uncertainties which may affect the assessments.


Introducing Likelihood of Occurrence and Expected Cost to Human Error and Functional Failure Reasoning Framework

Division / Sponsors: 
Design Engineering Division and Computers & Information In Engineering Division


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2020/volume/83907

IDETC2020 - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.