A large-scale group SLIM considering expert credibility under social network to estimate human error probabilities in the railway driving process

Abstract

The Large-scale Group Success Likelihood Index Method (LG-SLIM) can eliminate bias caused by a single expert in human error assessment. The traditional LG-SLIM uses trust degrees to cluster and reach a consensus. However, the existing clustering algorithms do not consider the trust degrees between a given pair of experts to be multiple and vary according to different evaluated tasks. Besides, the existing consensus models do not consider various combinations of the evaluated tasks and trusted experts’ professions when managing trust degrees and self-confidence. Therefore, the similarity-trust-based clustering algorithm is improved using the comprehensive trust degree integrated from diverse trust degrees concerning all evaluated tasks. Moreover, expert credibility is proposed to reflect the quality of the expert's evaluation results, determined by self-confidence and trust degree simultaneously according to various combinations of the expert profession and target task. Accordingly, under the social network derived from expert credibility, the incompatible outliers change their opinions by referring to the views of those with the highest expert credibility. Finally, the sensitivity experiment and comparative analysis verify the effectiveness of the proposed model. The proposed LG-SLIM model is useful for human error assessment when critical operations need many experts to obtain reliable and accurate results.