An essential element of a PSA is the analysis of operator performance. Plant operators, system components and the physical process are interacting parts of a complex system like a nuclear power plant that has to respond to specific conditions and events. The traditional methods of fault tree and event tree analysis are not capable of explicitly treating the time dependent interactions of the plant process variables (temperature, pressure etc.), system components and operator actions.

For that reason, a module (‘Crew Module’) was developed which can be applied in the framework of a dynamic reliability analysis. The ‘Crew Module’ allows simulating...