Dependence Assessment in Human Reliability Analysis Based on the Interval Evidential Reasoning Algorithm Under Interval Uncertainty

Dependence assessment, which is to assess the influence of the operator's failure of a task on the failure probability of subsequent tasks, is an important part in Human reliability analysis (HRA). The technique for human error rate prediction (THERP) has been widely applied to assess the dependence in HRA. However, due to the complexity of the real world, various kinds of uncertainty could occur in dependence assessment problem, and how to properly express and deal with uncertainty especially interval uncertainty remains a pressing issue. In this article, a novel method based on the interval evidential reasoning (IER) algorithm is proposed to assess dependence in HRA under interval uncertainty. First, dependence influential factors are identified and their functional relationship is determined. Then, judgments on these factors provided by the analysts are represented using interval belief distributions. Next, the interval evidential reasoning algorithm is employed to aggregate interval belief distributions of different factors according to their functional relationship while considering the credibility of the interval belief distribution. Finally, the conditional human error probability (CHEP) is calculated based on the fused interval belief distribution, where the upper and lower values are determined by assigning belief degree to the highest and lowest grade of the corresponding grade interval, respectively. Two numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed method not only properly deals with interval uncertainty using interval belief distribution and IER algorithm, but also provides a novel and effective way for dependence assessment in HRA.