Cognitive Engineering for Process Safety: Effective Training for Process Operators Using Eye Gaze Patterns

Control room operator errors are considered a major reason for accidents in the process industries. Inadequate training for operators is often considered one of the major causes of such accidents. A research report aimed at improved crew resource management in the Oil and Gas industry suggested that a systematic analysis for trends in human factors causes of accidents is important for development of operator training program. In addition process safety experts suggest training program with emphasis on operator decision making process for operator learning enhancement. Eye tracker based studies have been devoted to learning enhancement in various safety critical domains. In our previous research, we employed an eye tracker and observed the existence of characteristic gaze patterns for successful chemical plant operators. In this work, we use these eye gaze patterns along with results from a game based learning approach to develop a training methodology to impart process knowledge to plant operators. Our experimental studies using an ethanol plant simulator on 14 graduate level participants reveals the presence of characteristic fixation pattern that contain information about learning advancements.