Abnormal Situation Management and its Relevance to Process Safety for Offshore Operations
Authors: Reising Dal Vernon , Bullemer Peter , Colgate Bruce 
Published: September 2013

The Abnormal Situation Management (ASM) Consortium has been working together for almost twenty years to address process safety and operational challenges in Downstream industries. Recently, the ASM Consortium has expanded its focus to upstream enterprises, with many of the operating company members having extensive Oil & Gas businesses. The ASM Consortium performed a root cause analysis on thirdy-two incident reports that were gathered from public documents and from member companies. While several of the reports were from the Oil & Gas sector, the majority of the incident reports were from Downstream and Chemicals. The analysis identified common failure categories and common failure manifestations across the incidents. The three most common failure modes across the incidents were lack of a comprehensive hazard analysis program, lack of effective first-line leadership, and lack of a comprehensiave continuous improvement program. As a result of analyzing common failure manifestations for root causes associated with the ASM Effective Operations guideline on First-line Leadership, an audit checklist was developed to identify effective First-line leadership practices that would mitigate the root causes identified. Eighty-two percent of the basic causes were related to human reliability. Consequenlty, the Consortium completed three case studies on potential deployment solutions -- one that supported better shift handover communication and compared the use of a structured checklist to a unstructured handover, a second that supported better ‘alarm flood’ situations and compared a ‘trend visualization’ of alarms to a list-based alarm summary, and a third that supported better ‘situation awareness’ via overview displays using qualitative gauges, compared to a schematic display using numerical indication alone. In all three cases, professional operators participated in the case study evaluations. In the case study on shift-handover, the use of a structured checklist demonstrated a trend for improved quality of logbook entries and improved situation awareness of on-coming operators, compared to a handover process that was unstructured. The case study on mitigating the impact of ‘alarm floods’ demonstrated the effective alarm response for a given display approach was impacted by the response strategy used, more so than the display itself. Moreoer, the use of an ‘alarm throttling’ algorithm improved operator performance consistently across conditions, compared to the ‘unthrottled’ case. Finally, the case study on effective design and evaluation of overview displays demonstrated that the qualitative gauges improved operator situation awareness more than 200% compared to schematic layouts with numerical indicators. Abnormal situations represent near-miss events in the process safety pyramid; effective abnormal situation management is integral to a comprehensive process safety management program. There is very little literature that connects the process safety and human factors research generated by the ASM Consortium with Offshore operations. Moreover, recent emphasis within the SPE itself has identified human factors as a critical area for Offshore operations that needs more attention and understanding. This presentation will raise awareness within the Offshore community of previous process safety research findings from these ASM studies on how they relate and can be applied directly to Offshore concerns.