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Part I
Operational Integrity
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If you think safety is expensive, try an accident. Accidents
cost a lot of money. And, not only in damage to plant and in claims
for injury, but also in the loss of the companyās reputation.
Trevor Kletz (Process Safety Expert)
When we think about the future of the world, we always have in mind
its being where it would be if it continued to move as we see it moving now.
We do not realize that it moves not in a straight line ā¦ and that its
direction changes constantly.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosopher)
Control room operators and operation center controllers (hereafter we will use the term operator for both) manage the real-time performance of a capital enterprise easily worth many hundreds of millions of dollars. We ask them to shoulder the burden of everything that goes wrong during their watch, all without any recognition when nothing does, and precious little (if not actual blame) when something goes wrong and they are just barely able to manage things. Within their area of responsibility and authority they must be able to view every control loop, most sensors, all the equipment, and much of the supporting utilities, and then adjust as appropriate. This is not an easy job. When something actually does go very wrong, the inability to maintain situational awareness is a major loss. Its loss directly contributes to almost every disaster event that was not the result of spontaneous complete surprise. No one wants an incident. But incidents and disasters happen. We now know to a high degree of certainty that they happen because those in charge of ensuring that they do not happen are not aware that they are. They fail to know the situation. They are unaware of what is really going on, what is likely to happen, or what is not happening that they think is.
There is a lot of material here. But it is not intended to be exhaustive. Rather, it is a very good overview. It has been written in a relaxed style. Most of all, it should make sense and give you a very good start at putting your arms around control room operational safety. This book is about how to design for, attain, and sustain a responsible level of operational safety. We will get more into safety in the next chapter. For now, let us get started. Each chapter begins with a framework of important points. These key concepts should be helpful to identify important thoughts about the material.
1.1 Key Concepts
| Top Line | The only pathway to commercial success is to operate safely and responsibly. Safety and responsibility go hand in hand. All enterprises are capable of doing it that way. And the tools and skills are readily available and effective to use. |
| Enough Time | Having enough time is the single most essential ingredient for successful situation management. Notwithstanding everything else, if one has enough time, everything is possible. Without it, almost nothing is. |
| Managerās Role | It is managementās duty to ensure that the enterprise is appropriate to task, the operations team is effective, and the operational requirements are set for safe, responsible, and effective operations. |
| Operatorās Role | The operator is an essential part of the manufacturing team. Operator success will be limited by the extent that the enterprise is effectively designed, appropriately constructed, properly maintained, and responsibly managed (financially and administratively). |
| Situation Management | Situation management is a technology mature enough to provide a framework and methodology for an enterprise to significantly improve operatorsā abilities to effectively and successfully manage. |
| Cornerstones of Situation Management | The enterprise must provide: 1.Early enough warning to provide sufficient time for proactive and successful remediation to abnormal situations 2.Effective plans with appropriate contingencies 3.Sufficient resources at hand to be successful at managing, if success is possible 4.Conditional authority for all parties to act or continue to act to resolve operational problems so long as such action is appropriate |
| Accidents and Incidents | Accidents and incidents are not only growing in frequency, the extent of damage they cause is alarmingly increasing. If we are able to learn from the experiences of others, we might avoid many of the devastating impacts of firsthand knowledge. A failure-to-operate of any safety-related protection device, even if a second such device provided eventual full protection, is an incident and not a near miss. |
| Last Opportunity | Situation management provides the wherewithal and technology for the operator to attempt to successfully manage abnormal situations before existing infrastructure safe-operational safeguards are challenged. |
| Managersā Bottom Line | No reasonable amount of personnel selection, training, requirements enforcement, or anything else can surmount the reasonable ability of any individual person to perform. It is not responsible practice to place the majority of the burden on the hands-on operator beyond his appropriate capabilities. It is therefore a requirement for responsible enterprise operation that management provide appropriate tools, supervision, and assistance. |
| Operatorsā Bottom Line | It is the sum total of the decisions and actions the operator makes, within the capabilities of the enterprise, that determines whether or not the enterprise in his care operates safely and productively. |
1.2 Introduction
This book is intended to give you options, not tell you what to do. But, it is not meant to be a āchoose one from column 1 and one from column 2ā and so on. Rather, the coverage is intentionally broad. It is designed to reinforce your background if you are already working on control room technology and operator support. The materials here are not the only ways to achieve the goal of effective situation management. On the other hand, if you are new to all of this, this book provides a supportive background and comprehensive introduction. Certainly, there are additional resources that go considerably deeper into the ergonomics of operator station design, control room architecture, detailed construction of human-machine interface (HMI) screens and controls, and more. The references at each chapter end provide a few selected resources. Consider those once you have a good framework of what to ask and how to approach things.
This book is intended to give you options, not tell you what to do.
Take the time to understand what is going on and what is needed to do the job well. Situation Management for Process Control unifies the understanding of how to deliver real value to control room operations. Properly understood and executed, it is a game changer for safe and effective real-time management of industrial plants and operations. It delivers a firm technical framework that ties together all the traditional individual aspects (procedures, HMI, control room design, alarm systems, etc.) into a technology to understand and design effective control room management operations for enterprises. This is a unified approach with explicit tools to deliver situation management to control room operators. An important new contribution is the concepts and technology of weak signals and their use to supplement the alarm system to cover the rest of the situations that alarms are not intended or able to manage.
Operators monitor, understand, and manage situations and events that need intervention. We use people because of the expense of fully automating proper management without them; the complexity of automatically managing that makes it very difficult to design appropriate technology; the inability to predict events or manage those events that might be predictable but are too āsoftā to prearrange for their management; or, most often, a combination of these reasons. With...
