People and Operations in Resilient Systems
Recognising that human actions and decisions can contribute to as well as mitigate system disruptions, as well as affect other system components, the People and Operations in Resilient Systems research module focusses on the human factor in socio-technical systems.
The human reliability analysis (HRA)—an essential part of probabilistic risk assessments (PRA)—and other methodologies that address how human interactions with systems impact their resilience can be improved by:
- assessing human tasks across infrastructure sectors to devise a cross-sectorial HRA tool
- exploring novel ways to monitor and forecast the reliability of energy systems with advanced statistical methods
- developing tools to assess maintenance and/or adapt decisions to enhance the reliability of a particular system
The Human Performance and the Resilience of Sectors submodule involves a comparative assessment of sectors within the energy, transport, and distribution networks to identify equivalent tasks, working contexts, and reference reliability values. Based on these findings, a framework will be created for human reliability analysis to analyse critical scenarios within and across sectors.
The Operations, Maintenance Policies, Flexibility and Resilience submodule investigates ways to increase system reliability, such as how training, performance monitoring, and evaluation can improve operation and maintenance. It also looks at the degradation of system components and whole systems through a random-effect model approach, which would produce more realistic estimates of their remaining useful life (RUL).
Upon completion of this assessment, different maintenance policies can be analysed for operational costs, risk, expansion, flexibility, and resource constraints. Finally, outcomes from this research could serve as a guide in developing an economic model that determines the best way to design, deploy, and strategically manage systems, while also accounting for uncertainties in the long term.