Human Reliability Analysis for Maintenance Operations: Phoenix Methodology and an Example Application

In complex engineering systems, maintenance operations are vital for safety and system life cycle management, increasing the availability and reliability of equipment, instruments, and other elements. Human activities are a core ingredient of maintenance operations, which involve developing and following procedures and action plans to support installation, inspection, and repair tasks, among others. Human errors occurring during maintenance activities, such as installing or replacing a wrong part or assembling the part in the wrong sequence, can lead to severe accidents despite all technological enhancements and advanced organizational controls [1]. The majority of Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) methodologies to identify human error and estimate their probabilities have been developed for control-room operations in Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs). However, the nature of human activities in maintenance operations differs from control room operations and may even impact these considerably; hence, the modes and probabilities of potential errors by maintenance personnel require further investigation. The key steps are developing a general event sequence and tailoring a set of Performance Influencing Factors (PIFs) to adequately represent maintenance operators' activities and their context. The Phoenix HRA methodology was developed to support NPPs risk studies and has been adapted across different industries, including oil & gas, aviation, power generation, and others [2]–[3]. This paper aims to extend the Phoenix methodology to identify and assess human errors focusing on maintenance operations and presents an example application.