Abnormal Situations

The biggest reason why companies experience accidents is because of poor situation awareness. Poor situation awareness is when you didn’t realize you weren’t in normal anymore. You missed the alarm, and you didn’t realize you were getting close to the consequences. In other words, a critical alarm came up and it was ignored, and then you hit the consequences, and you have an accident.

Companies have a lot of knowledge around normal situations. They have a lot of procedures and a lot of training around normal. But as you get into abnormal, effectively there’s nothing. What we’ve had to do at UCDS is provide better solutions to fill this gap around abnormal.

One of the things we’ve done is concentrated on getting alarm management resolved. We’ve also concentrated on getting the HMI to be addressing issues long before the alarm ever comes in, so the operator becomes predictive. We’ve applied these new technologies, especially around the control room design, that will actually make an impact and help companies avoid abnormal situations.