Being a control room operator is very much experience based, so how can they learn how to maintain safe operation?

An effective control room is crucial to ensure the safe and efficient operation of any plant. The amount of work in a control room is dependent on the size and complexity of the plant, and the level of automation. The control room responsibilities may vary based on the plant, but will generally cover the following main tasks:

Operators in today’s modern control rooms face serious challenges to understand what’s going on inside their plants as the number of alarms increase. Configuring an alarm has never been easier.

The role of a control room operator is to monitor and take control if and when the automation and safety systems fail to provide safe and efficient production. This role remains the same even with increased level of autonomy and more remote control.  

We can define artificial intelligence like this: “Artificial Intelligence (Al) is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages,” (Techopedia, 2020).

The value of real-time decision-making in an oil & gas production process or at a petrochemical plant is closely related to situational awareness. In this setting, real-time is defined as time-critical decisions within seconds based on live real-time data. The control room operator normally operates in a time frame of seconds to minutes, but not all decisions are equally time critical. The reason we specify our understanding of real-time is to make a distinction to real-time that is also used for systems working on real-time data, but offline non-time critical. These kinds of applications are often used more as back-office support for operation and maintenance.

All production facilities will experience downtime sometime during production, where the facility will fail to operate within safe limits. The root causes or reasons behind this is either technical, operational, or organizational.