CHEMICAL ENGINEERING TRANSACTIONS VOL. 26, 2012 A publication of The Italian Association of Chemical Engineering Online at: www.aidic.it/cet Guest Editors: Valerio Cozzani, Eddy De Rademaeker Copyright © 2012, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l., ISBN 978-88-95608-17-4; ISSN 1974-9791 Performance Indicators for Training Assessment of Control-Room Operators Davide Manca, Salman Nazir, Simone Colombo Dipartimento di Chimica, Materiali e Ingegneria Chimica “Giulio Natta”, Politecnico di Milano Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 Milano, Italy davide.manca@polimi.it The performance assessment of industrial operators is a challenge faced by the scientific community in last decades on account of the subjectivity involved, lack of quantitative methods and complex trainer- trainee- relation. This paper presents a methodology to evaluate the performance of a control room operator according to operator performance indicators based on relevant human factors, which allows a quantitative and as well as qualitative assessment. The proposed methodology can be used not only for the assessment of operators but also for scheduling training courses, future recruitments, and insurance evaluations. 1. Introduction Operator Training Simulators (OTSs) for industrial processes are available in the market since years. On one hand, the availability of high performing computers at low prices and of robust dynamic simulators has lowered the entry threshold. On the other hand, OTSs are more frequently required by the Industry to take the training level of future operators to both acceptable and safe values, and to increase and refresh the knowledge of the process by existing operators. Actually, OTSs allow facing not only programmed operations but also abnormal situations that can be even singular. Rare events such as process startups and shutdowns can be simulated virtually a number of times, thus enhancing the degree of knowledge and experience of operators (Brambilla and Manca, 2011). Shared understanding and operation of the plant, among workers, allow increasing the safety of the process and may even improve its efficiency. Finally, OTSs allow keeping the knowledge and understanding of the process shared and within the company. These training tools avoid losing the expertise of workers who, after a long career, retire. The structure of common OTSs is based on the paradigm of trainer-trainee(s) interaction. Usually, a training room replicating the control-room devices and Human Machine Interphase (HMI) sees the trainer assigning some duties to one or more trainees that are evaluated according to their actions, decisions, timings and coordination with other operators. The trainer can either assign predefined exercises and observe the operator performance or modify ad libitum some process parameters to monitor how the trainee(s) respond to unexpected events and/or abnormal situations. Once the exercise comes to an end, the trainer assesses the performance of the operator(s) and outlines both correct and wrong/missing actions. During the assessment phase, the only means the trainer has to come up with a judgment on the trainee(s) performance is to refer to some process values recorded by the dynamic process simulator during the simulation session (replacing the real plant behavior in the OTS); but typically the final judgment, strongly depends on the personal opinion of 285