Situation Management for Process Control Book

Operators must actually be able to monitor what is in their charge, understand what that monitoring is showing them, and plan and actualize any needed changes. This begins with situation awareness. Situation awareness means knowing what is happening in the plant or operation and understanding what it means. The unfortunate reality is that there are few ready convenient indicators available to measure whether or not operators achieve good situation awareness, nor whether they even have the chance to achieve that awareness as a consequence of the design of their operator interface equipment. Missing situation awareness has been implicated in most of the incidents that have led to significant loss of life or plant damage and consequential environmental exposure. However, it is the combination of situation awareness, situation assessment, and the ability to successfully manage abnormal situations that we need — in other words, situation management. Proper situation management changes the game.