Integrating Prospective and Retrospective Human Error Analysis: A New Methodology

Human error remains a dominant contributor to major accidents in high-hazard industries, despite advances in engineering safeguards and process safety. Traditional incident investigations often focus retrospectively on identifying root causes, while proactive human reliability analyses aim to predict and prevent failures before they occur. However, these two approaches are rarely integrated within a single coherent framework. This paper introduces TABIE (Task Analysis Based Incident Evaluation), a structured methodology that integrates prospective and retrospective human error analysis to strengthen both incident investigation and proactive risk reduction. TABIE enables analysts to trace accident pathways from immediate operational failures back to latent organisational and task design weaknesses. The methodology is illustrated through a process industry case study involving maintenance-related latent failures, The analysis demonstrates how precursor failures propagate into operational phases and how the systematic evaluation of PIFs supports identification of the most cost-effective risk reduction strategies.

Keywords: Human error, Incident investigation, Human reliability, Performance Influencing Factors, Hierarchical Task Analysis, Safety Critical Task Analysis, Root cause analysis, Process safety, Barrier management, Risk reduction.