Human reliability for safe and efficient civil infrastructure operation and maintenance – A review

Abstract

Civil infrastructure systems (CIS) require effective systems-level operation and maintenance (O&M) processes to ensure safety and efficiency. Such processes demand significant human efforts in human/team cognition, decision-making, and execution of activities. Poor human behaviors could affect CIS O&M safety and efficiency. This review synthesized human reliability issues on three aspects – 1) Human-Physical, 2) Human-Human, and 3) Human-Cyber reliabilities, and thereby revealed research gaps to guide the development of methods that could achieve guaranteed CIS O&M safety and efficiency. One challenge is the lack of quantitative representations to formalize spatiotemporal, engineering process, and team behavioral models that quantify the impacts of various human factors on CIS O&M safety and efficiency. Besides, limited human/team behavioral data are available yet for comprehending human factors in highly uncertain CIS O&M scenarios. The paper concludes with future directions to facilitate multidisciplinary discussions to tackle the identified challenges.

Keywords

• Human reliability
• Civil infrastructure
• Operation management