Application of Human Reliability Analysis in risk assessment for hillside development

In certain developing countries, limited flat lands have becoming an issue and thereby impeded their development progression. To resolve the situation, some development projects were extended to hillside areas. Today, landslide cases were reported globally and most cases can be closely associated with hillside development areas. While landslide is known as natural hazard, findings have revealed that human errors also play major role in contributing to landslide events nowadays. Over the years, there is little emphasis or even no concerns over the importance of human error to be considered with landslide related problems in hillside development areas. Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) which in turn has been applied in other industries to assess the human factors contributing to risks and facilitate in identifying proper mitigation measure to reduce the risks can be proposed to be adopted into the landslide risk management. As more and more technological advancements introduced to facilitate the complex human activities, the need to focus on the aspects of human errors related is inevitably as such human and technological interactions are interrelated in every stages of a project therefore poised more errors to be made by human. This paper will review the current state of landslides and human error related issues in Malaysia and discusses the approach in Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) and how it can be incorporated into the current landslide risk management. An example of a concept of HRA-based risk assessment also will be discussed in this paper.