I have a friend, Chris Kelsey, who is a human factors engineer. He works for a very large defense contractor on a variety of projects. He's recently published a paper on the effects of long stints at panels for operators. The effects are not good, as you might expect.
We are facing a perfect storm. Plants are aging. Operators are aging. Health issues are increasing. New workers are incredibly less experienced, and don't have the situational awareness that their predecessors did. Companies are making operations and maintenance staffs do more with less. Young people have no desire at all to work in manufacturing (at least in the western world). At a conference I attended sometime back, an attendee called it, "working with the mediocre."
And it is clear that over and over accidents that have resulted in deaths or injuries or both-- and lots of lost production time and profits-- are caused or abetted by the operators' inability to understand what is going on. One of the causes of the deaths of 11 people aboard the Deepwater Horizon, we are given to understand, is that the young woman on the control panel had imperfect training in alarm handling, and didn't know what to do first when ALL the alarms went off.
A perfect storm.
There are, however, efforts being made to remedy, or at least ameliorate this situation.
The Abnormal Situation Management Consortium has been releasing guidance. ISA has standards committees (especially ISA18 and ISA106) working on the situation. The Center for Operator Performance is funding research so we can see how human factors actually works in process automation.
Emerson's Human-Centered Design initiative is a case in point. We've unconciously designed our control systems for engineers. Instead, we need to design them for operators. When you unpack your computer, you get a Quick Start Guide. Why? Because you want to use the apps on your computer, not learn how to program in C++. For the past several years, Emerson has conciously begun to design hardware and software to "consumer" standards of usability, and it is about time other companies get on the bandwagon.
ABB has also done an excellent job of "consumerizing" the operation of their field instruments-- they have evolved an interface that works like a typical cellphone interface. "Everybody knows how to use a cellphone," said ABB vp Pat Cashwell.
We're going to need new human factors engineers faster than we'll need some other disciplines in automation if we want to make the new generation of operators successful, and stop blowing up our plants and killing our fellow automation professionals.
