Abnormal Situation Detection - Operator Response in the Control Room
Stephen Maddox
I help engineers improve situation awareness in the control room so operators perform at the highest level when all hell breaks loose.
So many safety managers don't even have the control room operator on their radar. They have tunnel vision when it comes to safety. They don't think about the operator nearing the end of a 12 hour shift, fatigued, unplugged, thinking about the drive home, when all of a sudden huge flood of alarms jolts the operator into reactive mode. He scans the alarm summary screen, starts flipping through displays, the radio is full of chatter, the manager is looking over his shoulder, and the operator is trying to rely on his training but he's not sure he was trained on this event because, he does not know what just happened!
Does he send a field operator to investigate, is it safe to send his friend into what seems to be a containment loss of gasses or does he shut the process down risking back lash from management? If only he could have prevented this nightmare scenario. He has complained about the displays, the alarms, and lack of "abnormal situation management" tools, and he's completely unprepared for what is about to happen.
A typical high-volume, commodity operation, say a cumene/phenol plant, can easily realize significant savings by improving their process upset response. A one-day shutdown, or the production of unsalable product, can easily lead to a loss of $100K or more at today’s prices. This is a significant expense, assuming no associated equipment damage is found during inspections or a lengthy re-start is not involved.
Can you believe it's 2021, nearing 2022 and our industrial operations are still living with the risks and costs associated with abnormal situations and slow or improper operator response?
Every plant has a slip and fall safety manager, makes sense, however, the safety manager of the plant should have a program in place for "operator response to abnormal situations". This is a major deficiency in almost all organizations. Operator response or appropriate operator response during an upset is so important that every single operation should have a program in place that is 100% focused on Abnormal Situation Management.
ASM: What do we do?
Analyze your control room operations specifically identifying any gaps that impact the operator’s ability to manage abnormal situations. The goal is to develop an understanding of the operator management systems, user interfaces, and work environment from a "Situation Awareness" perspective:
We have 50+ years of experience with petrochemical, refining, and specialty chemicals experience working with over 200 plants and over 1,000 operators. This gives us an advantage when assessing your current operating conditions to identify deficiencies or gaps that impair the operator’s ability to manage abnormal situations. Our experience and knowledge allow us to provide this service remotely with surveys, data collection, and interviews. This saves money on travel and living expenses. The information we capture will provide a great amount of insight on how you can improve operator performance, how you compare against control room performance best practices, and how you can use our recommendations to develop a forward direction plan that will improve your Conduct of Operations and improve Operator Discipline. Our report will be of great value during internal discussions, planning, and setting production goals.
More information on the ASM Gap Assessment:
Phase One: We will collect specific data to analyze the operator interfaces and the operator environment - addressing issues with operator response and preventing abnormal situations.
?We focus on 3 human performance pillars:
1.???Detect
2.???Diagnose
3.???And Manage Abnormal Situations
?Our methodology uses; Situation Awareness, Human Factors, And Operator Behavior as the benchmark for our analysis and recommendations. Standards we will refer to are: EEMUA 191, ISA 18.2, IEC 62682, ISA 101, ISO 11064, API 755, HSE, and OSHA.
?The goal is to get the operators attention before alarms activate. Our report will address gaps identified in the following categories:
Other Engineering Services companies, unlike UCDS, will treat alarm management, display design, user interface technology, the console, and the design of the control room as separate projects. This approach leaves the operators with a control room that will see small improvements but will not see a complete user centered design solution (UCDS). To achieve User Centered Design, you must integrate the entire span of operator interfaces together. The operator interfaces, management systems, and environment should be intertwined into a synchronized ergonomic solution. A GAP assessment will serve as the road map to achieving a High-Performance Control Room.
Workload Evaluation:
We interview operators, shift supervisors, operations managers, and the most experienced controls engineer to determine if the workload perceived to be unbalanced, or if workload seems high for some positions and low for other positions. Based on the data and feedback received we will determine if a formal operator workload analysis is recommended and if staffing changes should be considered. We will provide reasons for our recommendation.
?Alarm Management:
We evaluate your alarm philosophy, identify who does what regarding alarm changes / improvements, identify what percentage of alarms are critical priority, medium priority, and low priority. If a high number of alarms are not prioritized correctly, we will provide a recommendation and a training class on the life cycle model for alarm management. We will evaluate your MOC process, and review alarm EEMUA 191 KPI’s. This information along with interviewing the controls engineer will allow us to provide an alarm management effectiveness score and recommendation for improvement.?We will evaluate against the (ISA 18.2 & IEC 62682 international standard). We will provide recommendations on how to provide alarm information in the displays, audio, and screens.?[email protected] can set up a demonstration of the alarm reporting software tool.
??High Performance Displays:
We evaluate your HMI site standard and style guide. We evaluate the design of operator displays for situation awareness. We will assess your displays to see if they are designed based on prioritized events that require operator attention. If you are not using a Level 1-4 hierarchy: (ISA 101) we will provide a training class on ISA 101. We will assess the operator’s ability to visually detect small changes in data to determine if change blindness occurs and if abnormal detection is possible without alarms. We will evaluate use of color, font size, graphic navigation during pre-determined modes of operation to discover if your displays are effective or defective.
??Ergonomic Screens / Video Walls / Lighting:
We will evaluate the number of screens, screen size, screen layout for the console, where screens should be located on walls and determine the best way to display the graphics and other interfaces they use. We often see operators with 8 or more screens on the desktop and other screens located on the wall, with no organization or grouping philosophy. We will provide a glare reduction study to ensure the displays and alarms are presented ergonomically and effectively. We provide a lighting evaluation with considerations for day shift and recommendations to reduce blue light for night shift workers. This is focused on Circadian rhythms, fatigue mitigation, vigilance, worker health and the ISO 11064. Vendor recommendations will depend on the needs of your operators.
Console Design:
We will assess operator tasks to determine if the workstation is fit for the worker or if the workstation is contributing to fatigue and health issues. We will determine if the console workstation screen layout can be changed to improve situation awareness and eye strain. We will refer to the ISO 11064 ergonomic control room standard.
Control Room Design: We will combine all the operator requirements captured from steps 1-5 into an analysis that will determine if the control room design meets the ergonomic standard, supports situation awareness, mitigates fatigue and health issues. We will provide details on all performance issues, including Traffic flow, distractions, neck, back, health issues, and any changes you can make to improve operator response during abnormal situations. We will provide details in the report capturing all the information and recommendations for achieving a Situation Awareness control room design; addressing risks associated with fatigue, situation awareness, predictability, ergonomics, and human performance / behavior (ISO 11064). This is a user centered methodology that puts the operator’s needs, health, and performance above everything else.
During the study we will understand the organizational culture, shift worker discipline level, gage the experience and knowledge from top to bottom, assess communication and information sharing / study the ability to capture knowledge and digitize data / assess shift team moral / provide insight on the current people / behavior / perceptions / and willingness to improve (current climate analysis).?
All data collection, surveys, questionnaires, interviews, Teams meetings, report writing, presentations, reviews, etc will be conducted remotely and scheduled based on availability. (We are likely the only company that is equipped to successfully do this remotely, BC we have evaluated over 200 sites and studied over a thousand control rooms we can quickly and easily pinpoint gaps and issues that we have seen time and time again. We understand automation, process safety, SIS, controls engineering, maintenance schedules, contractor involvement, operator responsibility, and plant management. We have seen it all and seldom ever get surprised.?
We deliver a detailed report with 3 parts: Executive summary, report for middle level management and full report for operations personnel. We provide a presentation on-line outlining major issues, listing our recommendations, and providing consultation on any challenges that arise. All recommendations will include an explanation, will reference a best practice, or provide proven research analysis for reference. We will act as your partner when you move forward with any changes, projects, or planning by providing a SME for all control room operator performance improvement questions.
This is how your safety manager can start an Abnormal Situation Response Program for under $100K.
www.mycontrolroom.com??