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 The role of Situation Awareness for the Operators of Process Industry Salman Nazir, Simone Colombo, Davide Manca* Dipartimento di Chimica, Materiali e Ingegneria Chimica “Giulio Natta”, Politecnico di Milano Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 Milano, Italy davide.manca@polimi.it Situation awareness (SA) is commonly described as the challenges encountered by an operator and it appears during the course of interaction with either the process itself or a human machine interface. Application and significance of SA is well established in different production sectors such as aviation, armed forces, and air traffic. The importance and significance of SA for Field Operators (FOPs) and for Control-Room Operators (CROPs) is highlighted and discussed in this paper. The major factors that influence the SA of operators in the process industry are identified, presented, and discussed. Furthermore, the career track of operators with respect to its effect on SA is also analyzed and the concept of Team Situation Awareness (TSA), which is the coordination among different operators (intra and inter teams) is presented. 1. Introduction Situation Awareness (SA) is the term that was first proposed in World War I by Oswald Boekle to reference the capability of getting awareness of the enemy prior to the similar awareness gained by the enemy and eventually the target achieved by the one who has more and better awareness (Gilson, 1995). The importance of situation awareness was initially understood neither by the industry nor by the scientific community. The topic has started gaining the interest of several researchers from different scientific fields since late eighties of the last century. The scope of the application of this terminology is wide open including safety-critical sectors such the aviation (air traffic control) and the nuclear industry (the first to tackle this point) together in the following a variety of other sectors such as the civil protection (first responders), the medical sector and eventually reaching the process and sport ones as extensively discussed in the literature (Endsley and Robertson, 2000). In the process industry, the last two decades have been marked by a significant increase of automation, advanced control, on-line optimization, and supply chain tools and technologies that have significantly increased the complexity and sensitivity of the role of the operator(s) and team(s) (Salmon et al., 2009). The interaction of the operator with complex computer interfaces calls for more efficient SA (Endsley and Garland, 2001). The industrial operator of the process industry is no longer simply a well-trained worker with limited knowledge of his/her prescribed field of work. Conversely, the role of operator is more demanding and important than ever before (Skjerve, 2004). Specifically, an industrial operator before the automation era used to be active physically by operating the process manually. In the past, the control loops were locally distributed in the field or concentrated in local control-rooms. Consequently, fewer trips to the field were sufficient to gather process information and to make process adjustments. Conversely, the operator of modern industrial plants faces different challenges due to the involved complexity. Hence, this not only increases the chances of possible errors but also results in a set of factors, which may be 303