Human Error in Process Plant Design and Operations ─ A Practitioner's Guide

The book basically shows you how to analyze operator, maintenance, and management error for oil, gas, and chemical plants. The book describes practical approaches to human error analysis in process plant operations, including estimated error and accident frequencies. Based on the well known SRK model of human error it represents a practical collection of examples and statistics from over 30 years of study, with many examples of the practical application of methods.

Mr. Taylors work in risk assessment and safety engineering started at the British Atomic Energy Authority Harwell Laboratory in 1968, working on the reliability of air traffic control systems. The research and development work continued at the Danish National Laboratory at Riso, with emphasis on increasing the practicality and accuracy of risk assessment, and on developing effective methods for human reliability analysis in process plant operations. During this time some firsts were established, including the first hazop study outside of England, and the firs oil platform risk assessment.

By 1982, the research work had become sufficiently useful that Mr. Taylor participated in the committee work on implementation of the Seveso Directive in Denmark, with publication of the Danish Green Book guidelines for risk assessment of major hazards plant. This line of work culminated in 1992, with submission to parliament of the national comparative risk assessment for all the Danish chemical plants, a project led by Mr. Taylor.

By 1984 it had become obvious that performing risk assessment and safety engineering within the framework of a national laboratory would not provide sufficient direct experience, and Mr. Taylor started a risk assessment consultancy within the company Oilconsult A/S. This built up over two years, from a single person to a department of 14. In 1987, Mr Taylor started the company Taylor Associates, and was appointed as Advisor to Petroleos de Venezuela in the field of major hazards accidents, and served for six years, training a team of 250 safety engineers, and supervising risk assessments and risk reduction programmes for all the Venezuelan oil and gas and petrochemical installations.

In the period from 1987 through to 2001, Mr. Taylor also undertook a large number of risk assessment projects, many of them quite small, some very large. This has given a very broad experience.

Key publications are a 30 year serial study of design error in process plant, published as a special edition of Safety Science ; an extensive collection of baseline failure rate data (the RELBASE data base) developed for the Dutch VROM; and a complete evaluation of the quality of modelling in risk assessment, carried out for the Danish Environmental Agency, published in 2007. Mr. Taylor has taught a university level course in risk assessment at the Technical University of Denmark, from 1978 through to 1990, and over 100 post-experience short courses in risk assessment and safety engineering.