Conceptualizing Performance Shaping Factors in Main Control Rooms of Nuclear Power Plants: A Preliminary Study

Human errors are widely-accepted to be a major contributor to incidents and accidents in complex, safety-critical systems. Human reliability is influenced by individual, organizational, and environmental factors, which are called as performance shaping factors (PSFs). Identifying and managing PSFs are important for quantifying human error probability in human reliability analysis (HRA) and preventing human errors in main control rooms (MCRs) of nuclear power plants (NPPs). This study proposes a conceptualization framework for PSFs to identify and organize PSFs in MCRs of NPPs. It describes PSFs at three levels, components, factors (i.e., dimensions), and indicators. The expected result is the full-set PSF model for MCRs of NPPs. The future study is to weight and rank the PSFs from this full-set PSF model and to identify the elite-set PSF model with key PSFs to inform the HRA quantitative analysis.