AM-10-118 Situation Awareness for Refining and Petrochemical Process Operators – Not by Technology Alone

Description:

An important responsibility of console operators is to prevent and respond to abnormal situations. The nature of the abnormal situation may be of minimal or of catastrophic consequence; it is the job of the operations team to identify the cause of the situation and execute compensatory or corrective action in a timely and efficient manner. Abnormal situations extend, develop, and change over time in the dynamic process control environments increasing the complexity of the intervention requirements. Proactively maintaining their situation awareness of the process, where it is, where it is going, and how quickly it is going there, is what is required of both console and field operators to effectively prevent and respond to abnormal situations when they arise. Successfully responding to abnormal situations depends upon both console and field operators knowing not only what tasks to perform and how to perform them, but also when to perform them. To become proficient, an operator must know what to watch, how frequently to watch, what to do, how to do it, and when to do it – all components of knowledge that contribute to effective situation awareness. To attain situation awareness, operators must be able to assess what the current state of the system is, and using their mental model of process operations, assess what the future state of the process will be in response to specific operator actions.