The first QRM of 2016 was successfully concluded at Honeywell’s Houston office. The QRM attendees, who are the operating company members and Honeywell customers, discussed the year’s new research proposals and reviewed the progress of the ongoing research. The Quarterly Review Meetings are a platform for the ASM Consortium members to share the benefits gained from the ASM practices and products, and to discuss new challenges faced in plant operations.

To create awareness about the serious nature of process safety incidents, the ASM Consortium continues to track and record incidents and accidents happening globally. In 2015, we recorded more than 1000 incidents on our website. The incidents list is not all inclusive but provides a comprehensive list of global incidents affecting process industries as reported in the media. The ASM Consortium has been archiving such incidents since 2008.

The Canadian Standards Association (CSA) group has come up with a Human Factors Guideline document specific to the pipeline industry, ‘Pipeline Human Factors Express Document’. The CSA group’s guideline document refers the ASM Consortium’s HMI guidelines document ‘Effective Console Operator HMI Design’. It also recommends referring the ASM Consortium’s guidelines ‘Effective Alarms management’ and ‘Effective procedural Practices’ for alarms and procedure management.

The ASM Consortium has now a Twitter account @asmcons. The Consortium also has created a company page on LinkedIn. Both the Tweeter and LinkedIn account will help in establishing ASM Consortium’s social media presence.

In 2015, the ASM Consortium conducted a webinar series, exclusively, for the employees of its member companies. The webinar series covered the latest results of the research undertaken by the Consortium in the field of HMI design, Large Screen Displays and Training for abnormal situations. The webinars were well attended globally, as each webinar was conducted twice to cover all the time zones. The webinars targeted individuals in the role of Plant Manager, Operations Manager, Engineering Manager, Project Manager, Operations Supervisor, DCS Engineer, Application Engineer, Training Specialist or Operator on special assignment. The recordings of the webinars and the past webinars as well, are available on the ASM Consortium’s members only collaboration website.

At the CCPS European Workshop on Process Safety, the ASM Consortium gave a keynote presentation on ‘Effective HMI Design for Safety-Instrumented Systems ’. The paper covered the key challenges and requirements for console operator situation awareness for SIS HMI design. The presentation was done by Dr. Peter Bullemer and Dr. Dal Vernon Reising of Human Centered Solutions, associate member of the ASM Consortium.