By Bill Lydon, Editor
The PAS Technology Conference held on April 22-24, 2013, in Houston, Texas was focused on improving reliability, providing attendees with industry insights, and knowledge sharing. The conference featured legendary industry people including Eddie Habibi - PAS Founder & CEO, Larry Evans - AspenTech Founder & former CEO, and Pat Kennedy - OSIsoft Founder & CEO.
Human Reliability
Eddie Habibi gave a thoughtful presentation about human reliability. Habibi began his presentation with a reflection on how worldwide GDP was nominal until the industrial revolution which is when it really grew. He attributes improved productivity, economic conditions, and prosperity to the growth of automation, knowledge sharing, information sharing, and collaboration over time. Habibi stated that this has been accelerating with the application of technology and is a continuing trend. To illustrate the point, he highlighted how refineries now run with half as many people as were required in 1970 and they are producing twice as much by applying automation.
The growth of automation technology in many cases, with a lack of good systems engineering over time, has resulted in many plants having a number of uncoordinated systems and PLCs. Subsequently, this un-coordination has lead to complex systems with disparate software. The unfortunate consequences of these systems include increased difficultly for operators, monetary losses, and in some cases, loss of lives. By discussing major accidents, Habibi suggested that the operator is a victim of circumstances caused by engineers who implemented weak control strategies, poorly designed alarms, bad engineering, and shortcuts by low bid contractors.
The primary goal of human reliability is to prevent human error. Habibi suggests there are three essential elements for human reliability - physical environment, organizational culture, and the human-automation relationship.
The physical environment includes temperature, lighting, chairs, console, and other ergonomic considerations that in many operations have been overlooked and result in a poor environment for operators. In contrast, he shared examples of control rooms that are ergonomically designed including better lighting and appropriate furniture.
Organizational culture is driven by management empowerment of employees with policies, procedures, and training for efficient and safe operations.
The human-automation relationship impacts the direct operator interaction with the systems and can be enhanced with proper system design and comprehensive alarm management. Habibi made the point that improving the human-automation relationship can quickly have an impact on productivity and safety.
Larry Evans, Founder & Former AspenTech CEO
Larry Evans discussed how information technologies are available to bring value to the process industries by enabling individuals and organizations to make better decisions and reduce the probability of major accidents. This is accomplished by enabling processes for management of change, automating configuration management, identifying & resolving critical configuration errors, and aiding operator alarm responses. These solutions need to allow plant engineers and operators to make more good decisions and fewer bad ones. He challenged the audience to think creatively about the types of data and models that are needed. Most importantly he stressed that engineers need to learn to communicate the bottom line benefits of technology investments to management.
Pat Kennedy, OSIsoft Founder and CEO
Pat Kennedy, OSIsoft Founder and CEO, commented that someone once described the job of an operator as one of sheer terror. Kennedy said, “You sit there waiting for something to break and hope you can handle it.” Kennedy discussed the value of sensor data coupled with computing. He used an example of smart automobiles that use sensors and computing to avoid a collision. Kennedy observed that two cars hitting each other is a human fault.
The time it takes a person to realize that a collision is going to happen is a “millennium” in compute time. The new collision avoidance systems consist of the application of sensor and computing technology available today to deliver a new level of safety on high end cars. But there is no reason that “new level” shouldn’t occur in other applications as technology cost come down. His premise is that today technology is available to do more advanced functions.
Collision warning systems in action at Consumer Reports test track
Kennedy noted that the investments in systems to acquire and refine data to improve operations and help operators are worthwhile. The challenge is the frequency and volume of sensor sampling creates very large amounts of data. Fortunately technology is available to improve this situation. The biggest challenge is to use that volume of data available - termed “Big Data” - to improve productively. The big issues are requirements for high data bandwidth communications and handling the volume of data.
Consider, for example, 1 million sensors. He explained how traditional big data methods create a dataset and then work on the data. In theory, you create a new dataset every time there is an update and the result is data redundancy. For example, SAP uses a virtual tank to keep track of usage that needs to be reconciled with the real tank at some point. In the interim, there are two sets of data that represent the same tank.
Kennedy is confident that technology is available today to improve situational awareness and human reliability.
Thoughts & Observations
The take away I have from the 2013 PAS conference is that improving human reliability requires properly orchestrated application of technology and human engineering.
