The ASM Consortium and Honeywell authors wrote an article for InTech on “The Human Side of Safety”. The article discusses the need for better attention to human factors to reduce the frequency and severity of process safety incidents.

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Ling Rothrock and Penn State to the ASM Consortium. The Penn State research team develops and uses human-in-the-loop (HITL) simulations to enable knowledge and skill development through scenario-based training. They also use HITL simulations to assess communication and coordination in teams. The team uses computational tools, such as finite state machines, to evaluate the coherence and efficacy of procedures.

Herman Van Roost, General Manager Industrial Organization and Competences Project, Total Petrochemicals recently presented this paper at the Safety Culture Management conference in Prague. "The Need for Excellence in Safe Operations to Manage High Risk Plants" discusses why, with so much emphasis on process safety, the problem continues to get worse. He shares his thoughts on how the required competency to operate plants is increasing at the same time the complexity of the operation is also increasing. Mr. Van Roost shares a case study and how the initial finding led to "human error" as the problem, but subsequent analysis found that the incident occurred due to lack of adapted formalism and coherent supervision & coordination for complex operations like unit start-up. The ASM Consortium finds this paper and discussion in line with our thinking on managing abnormal situations and would like to thank Mr. Van Roost for allowing us to post his paper on our site.