A Fuzzy CREAM Method for Human Reliability Analysis in Digital Main Control Room of Nuclear Power Plants

Abstract

Human error is an important factor leading to nuclear power plant (NPP) accidents. The increasing of the amount of information improves the operators’ human error probability (HEP) in the digital main control room of NPPs. Human reliability analysis (HRA) is considered to be an effective method to reduce human error. The Cognitive Reliability and Error Analysis Method (CREAM) is one of the widely accepted HRA methods. However, there are shortcomings that weaken the applicability of this method. Therefore, this research proposes a fuzzy CREAM method based on a combination of fuzzy logic theory and the CREAM method. The study considers the weight of common performance conditions (CPCs) and constructs a logical relationship between CPCs and control modes. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is determined using a widely accepted method to validate the evaluation results. The validated results showed that the evaluation result has a consistency between the fuzzy CREAM method and the traditional CREAM method. They indicated that the fuzzy CREAM method can obtain reliable HEP.

Keywords:

• Human error
• human reliability analysis
• CREAM
• fuzzy CREAM
• common performance conditions

Acknowledgments

This study was conducted in the laboratory of the College of Mechanical Engineering at Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China. Thanks are due the reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. Also, the authors would like to thank all the participants and those who provided help to this work.