Risk assessment of man‐machine systems under safety‐critical multitasking situations

Abstract Multitasking is increasingly common in highly complex and safety‐critical systems, especially under abnormal situations. Mental overload (MOL) may occur and result in forgetting/mistaking tasks uncertainly. Such probabilistic errors could have catastrophic consequences and contribute greatly to the multitasking risk of man‐machine systems. In this paper, to better identify the risks of safety‐critical multitasking situations, MOL mechanism is investigated and a risk analysis method considering MOL is proposed. MOL occurs when the demand for resources estimated by Multiple Resources Model exceeds an operator's ability. Then, the operator's performance degrades, and s/he tends to mistake or abandon parts of tasks. Based on the MOL mechanism, a MOL‐performance dependency (MOL‐PDEP) gate is proposed to incorporate MOL into risk analysis. Its inputs are concurrent tasks, and it triggers the related hazardous human behavior events with certain probabilities if MOL occurs. Through this gate, the dependence among these events and their nondeterministic cause relationships to MOL are added to traditional fault tree (FT), which presents a challenge issue to FT analysis. An implicit method is proposed to analyze the FT with MOL‐PDEP gate and calculate the accident probability. A case study on a helicopter crash accident demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.