Outlines of a Hybrid Model of the Process Plant Operator

Abstract

Modelling the performance of human operators as an integral part of a system is becoming a vital problem to process plant designers. Reviews of major system failures and accidents repeatedly find that the human element plays a major role in 50--70% of the cases (Cornell, 1968. Rasmussen, 1969. Scott, 1971). The increasing reliability and safety requirements caused by the rapid growth in production unit size force the designer to include consideration of abnormal plant conditions due to failures of extremely low probability. For such tasks the operator will not be able to compensate design deficiencies by his great adaptability, and the interface design cannot evolve through trial and error. This situation is further accentuated by the rapid development of data processing and display equipment with potential for very complex man-machine interaction.