(511f) Immersive Digital Experiences for Process Safety Decision Making

Process safety is a key consideration in industrial operations and required as part of undergraduate chemical engineering program training through ABET. Although undergraduate programs focus on process safety strategies such as HAZOP and management of change, it is clear that incidents may also occur due to poor decision making. Decision-making research from the behavioral ethics literature contends that a “practice field” is necessary to evaluate a person’s decision-making ability, but this would be unreasonable and unsafe in industrial practice. For this reason, we propose the use of virtual environments where we can place engineers into realistic scenarios and ask them to respond to authentic dilemmas, with realistic incentives and disincentives for their actions to better understand approaches to process safety decisions.

This work presents results from a pilot study investigating the use of a virtual environment to allow process safety decision making in a faux-industrial setting. The virtual environment follows a 15 day story arc where individuals are faced with decisions ranging from everyday staffing concerns to more serious process safety dilemmas. A Neo-Kohlbergian ethical model for decision making was probed using in-simulation reflection prompts. A discussion of the digital environment and preliminary findings from user experiences will be presented.