Analyzing Procedure Performance using Abstraction Hierarchy: Implications of Designing Procedures for High-risk Process Operations
Abstract
Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are a vital element of everyday operations in chemical process industries. Incident investigations also indicate that a majority of adverse events in the processing operations are ascribed to issues associated with SOPs. Although there have been continuous efforts to improve informational and perceptual aspects of SOPs, assessing them from a systems perspective remains a persistent gap. As one novel way to address such gap, this study employs an ecological approach to understand the functional structure of the work domain, that is, abstraction hierarchy (AH) and its relations to SOPs and operator performance. First, this study models a 3-phase separation system, a common gas-oil-water separation process, using an abstraction-decomposition space as a work domain of the system. Second, we assess the AH level, one dimension of the abstraction-decomposition space, of the SOPs developed for three tasks in the 3-phase separation system. In order to consider operators’ knowledge about the tasks, experience-task familiarity (E-TF) level is also assessed as a combinatory factor. To this end, a two-way analysis of variance is conducted to find out the effect of E-TF level (high vs. low) and AH level of the SOPs (physical vs. functional) on the operator’s performance. Results show significant main effects of the E-TF level and AH level on the successful performance of the SOPs. The interaction effect of the two variables is considered marginally significant. Based on the results, several implications for the design of SOPs in relation to the AH of the chemical processing domain are discussed.
Description
PresentationSubject
Procedure PerformanceCollections
Citation
Ade, Nilesh; Peres, S. Camille; Sasangohar, Farzan; Son, Changwon (2019). Analyzing Procedure Performance using Abstraction Hierarchy: Implications of Designing Procedures for High-risk Process Operations. Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center; Texas &M University. Libraries. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /193421.