Use of HERA to inform human reliability analysis

This paper discusses the Human Event Repository and Analysis (HERA) database system sponsored by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to collect human performance information to support its human reliability analysis (HRA) and potentially human factors applications. The discussion of this paper focuses on the HRA aspect. Lack of sufficient and appropriate human performance data has been a key factor affecting HRA quality. Consequently this could affect the qualities of PRA and risk-informed decisionmaking. The HERA system has been developed to provide needed data to improve HRA quality. The HERA system consists of a data collection methodology and process to collect quality human performance information and software to process data. The data collection methodology and process are discussed in an NRC technical report. This paper discusses the types of human performance information that currently can be generated from the HERA software. Human performance information regarding an individual event (e.g., sequence of the event) and detailed analysis of a specific human response can be directly obtained from HERA. Human performance observations from multiple events require further process. HERA's approach for obtaining such insights provides mechanisms to identify the information of interest and export the information in a standard format to data analysis software for further analysis, e.g., factor analysis. This gives analysts freedom to choose the methods and software for data analysis.