(44g) Reliability Analysis of Man-Machine Response to an Emergency Situation Based On a Detailed-Action Plan

The primary emergency response actions in oil and gas industries are the functions of the process safety control system and the actions completed by the control room operators. The performance of the safety control system and the control room operating crew has a significant role in proper emergency response. To overcome each critical scenario, an emergency response operating procedure is provided with specific instructions, that in this research paper it is named a detailed action plan (DAP). This term is recommended for this purpose by the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS). The reason of using a DAP is to reduce the probability of error in the emergency response of control room operators by providing scenario-specific written instructions. However, most of the DAP’s are developed during design phase when there is no opportunity to test them  through emergency drills. Therefore, a framework is proposed to analyze the reliability of the DAP’s. This framework should be able to determine reliability of every single human and equipment action as well as the combined human-machine reliability, modeled by means of a  Reliability Block Diagram to calculate the reliability of integrated automatic-operator emergency actions. The framework focuses on incorporating the operational and cognitive operator’s errors in the process/equipment reliability analysis. For this purpose, a human reliability analysis method named SPAR-H was utilized. The proposed framework was applied for analyzing DAPs of an emergency well control operation in order to check and improve the applicability of this framework. The presented framework facilitates the DAP assessment process by performing task analysis modeling the detailed tasks, and completing a human-machine reliability analysis. Besides, the application of the presented framework, its findings and recommended actions enables a considerable improvement in the reliability of DAPs and therefore proves its efficiency and effectiveness.