Can Your Operators Respond Quickly Enough to Safety Alarms?

Plant reliability and safety is improved when there is confidence that correct operator response will occur.  Unfortunately, a disproportionate share of process safety incidents has occurred where the required actions did not happen as planned or happened too late. The effectiveness of a safety alarm is limited primarily by the probability that the operator follows a defined course of action in a timely manner in response to the alarm presentation. The operator requirements must be defined both in terms of needed action(s) and response time. This paper will discuss some of the challenges in defining the operator requirements and in validating the required actions and timeliness. It will then propose some approaches to meeting those challenges.