Human Performance Training

Operator competency has been a major challenge for the petrochemical and refining industry for decades. In recent times, human factors are believed to be a consistent contributing cause for a lot of incidents. Current schemes used to determine an operator's competency are subjective and somewhat biased. Training tests are subjective to the creators of the tests and training materials are subjective to the knowledge and experience of the developers. People learn and retain information at different rates thus making the training process more difficult. Adequate training is hard to achieve. Once an operator is released to work independently, what the operator doesn't know or understand about the process may not be evident until costly mistakes are made. For this reason, it is very important to implement some type of human performance assurance program to ensure operators are consistently performing at a safe and acceptable level. One method to ensure safe performance by operators is to incorporate operating information archived in the DCS into the existing training schemes. DCS information can then be analyzed and compared with the established safe operating envelope of the process. Information from the study can then be used to enhance the existing training system.

The presenter will present a 20-30 minutes presentation about the need to incorporate existing human performance into training system and Siemens's approach to Human Performance Training utilizing DCS data.