Team Skill Preparedness of Operation Personnel in Emergency Conditions

Abstract

Human reliability is one of the important determinants for the system safety [1]. Nuclear Energy Agency reported that approximately half of events reported by foreign nuclear industry were related with inappropriate human actions [2]. The human error problems can be viewed in two ways: the person approach and the system approach. Other terms to represent each approach are active failures and latent conditions. Active failures are unsafe acts committed by people who are in direct contact with systems whereas latent conditions are the inevitable ‘resident pathogens’ within the system. To identify what kinds of non-technical skills were needed to cope with emergency conditions, a method to evaluate preparedness of task management in emergency conditions based on monitoring patterns and verbal protocol analysis was presented. Five characteristics were suggested to evaluate non-technical skills: communication completion, supportiveness of situation awareness building, thoroughness, latent procedural mistake resistibility, and latent procedural violation resistibility. Case study was done by analyzing emergency training of 9 different real operation teams in the reference plant. The result showed that the 9 teams had their own emergency task management skills which resulted in good and bad performances.