The safe operation of an asset is one of the most important things to ensure. We all know that the possible consequences of an incident may involve damage to people, asset, and the environment. Process industries are using various techniques to identify and prevent hazards and incidents. So how can we sleep well at night, and know that the safety has been maintained using the best practices available? One approach is to use hazard study techniques to understand and prepare for the different risks. This is only one part of a complex challenge where several important factors can have an influence, such as training, safety culture, workload, and process design.

Everyday life puts all of us in situations where we must make decisions, some of them concerning safety. Think about the last time you overtook another car. What kind of safety margins do need to decide to step on the gas?

Imagine that your car changed behavior overnight so that the next morning when driving to work you notice that the location of the brake pedal has changed. Would you feel confused and unconfident? It is easy to understand the importance of introducing modification to the control room and changes to the process in a planned and controlled manner, when considering the car scenario. All operational personnel should be kept updated about coming changes. The most important personnel with respect to these kinds of changes are the control room operators.

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.  

The history of Artificial Intelligence goes all the way back to the classical antiquity where the idea of intelligent robots (such as Talos) and artificial beings, such as Galatea and Pandora, were a part of Greek Mythology (McCorduck, P., 2004). Talos was a giant automatic machine circling the shores and protecting Europe from pirates and invaders.

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.