Journey To Increased Operator Awareness

Unplanned slowdowns, trips or shutdowns account for a significant loss of production in the chemical and petrochemical industry and may lead to environmental events or even serious incidents. From incident investigations it became very apparent that a significant contributing factor can be the human factor, specifically how board operators handle critical conditions in plant operations.

Studies by the ASM® Consortium indicated that about 50% of incidents were propagated by failures in the detection and diagnosis of abnormal situations. A survey carried out by IDC in 2008 estimated the loss to US and UK industry due to human error was £18.7billion (~$30billion). So there is a very large incentive to address the issues we know to be causal factors in not just the headline issues, but in many of the small incidents that have the potential to impact our operations every day.

At LyondellBasell we therefore created a ‘Human Factors’ initiative in 2006 to address what we identified as potential contributing issues – things like alarm management, HMI (Human Machine Interface) and control loop performance. The first step was to install 24/7 monitoring tools to give us a good picture of the actual performance of our alarm systems. This initial implementation of an alarm management application required activities that typically are performed only once, including:

• Collect data and benchmark current alarm system performance

• Establish standard reporting, KPIs and easy-to-use drill-down tools for troubleshooting

• Validate the current alarm database and documentation for import into an alarm knowledge base (AKB) under management of change (MOC).

When it became apparent that we did not always meet industry leading alarm performance in some of the KPI, we started to implement continuous improvement initiatives at our production sites and initiated alarm rationalization projects where needed. This led to significant improvements in the alarm management performance at our sites and all our olefin units are now achieving average alarm loading below the target of 6 alarms/operator/hour.

But reducing the alarm load alone will not resolve one of the key changes we wanted to achieve: operation by awareness where operators will continuously monitor key variables to stay in touch with the process and ensure it runs smoothly.

Based on feedback from alarm rationalizations and alarm audits we did at our sites, it became obvious that the existing HMI did not always lend themselves to this mode of operations. So we teamed with one of the leading experts in the field to develop a common company standard for ‘High Performance HMI’ and started to convert our existing HMI into ASM (Abnormal Situation Management) style HMI where information, not data, is the key. Part of this process is the introduction of large screen overview displays to provide operators at a glance a good overview of what is happening in their area of control. We are just finishing the design of our first overview screen for an olefin unit.

Results from our alarm management success and our HMI improvements will be addressed in this presentation.