User:Tipsinc/Operator awareness

Operator Awareness is a niche within the discipline of Situation Awareness. Operator Awareness applies the concepts of Situation Awareness to the environment of a production or manufacturing facility control room. Operator Awareness essentially acknowledges that organizations staff production and manufacturing control rooms with human operators, and give those operators responsibility for observing and managing that facility. Because humans are subject to limitations in cognitive scope yet have a unique ability to perceive patterns and anomalies, special care must be given to the design and implementation of the control room environment and all elements of that environment. Those elements include, but are not limited to: room shape, lighting, acoustics, windows and doors, workspace layout and position, seating, communication mechanisms and requirements, human-machine-interface (HMI) graphics and screen navigation, abnormal condition alerts and alarms, staff workload and scope of responsibility, training, and documentation.

Although Operator Awareness is specific to the control room environment, the basic tenet of Situation Awareness remains intact: "being aware of what is happening around you to understand how information, events, and your own actions will impact your goals and objectives, both now and in the near future." The focal objective is enabling a facility operator to perceive the condition of a facility, recognize abnormal trends, and respond to those abnormalities for successful avoidance of an upset or incident.

Operator Awareness has been extensively studied by organizations such as the ASM Consortium, the EEMUA (Engineering Equipment and Materials Users Association), the Center for Operator Performance, the Mary Kay O'Connor Center for Process Safety, and by the organizations that utilize facility control rooms.

The opportunity driver behind Operator Awareness is enabling operators to implement a process change prior to that process entering an abnormal state. To this end it is crucial that operators be provided with concise information about the condition of their process and be prepared to respond to an abnormal trend with an appropriate and effective response. The reason this opportunity is so valuable can be illustrated using a "Process State Transition Diagram" and a simplistic plot of state transition over time: