This BCM article reports Invensys is working on a virtual environment simulation which can improves plant safety and production. From the article: "The creative coupling of human factors, process simulation knowledge and virtual reality has led to the emergence of a new generation of immersive training simulators. Maurizio Rovaglio, Invensys Process Systems (IPS) shows how Virtual Environment (VE) simulation can improve plant safety and production.
Today’s process plants face all the real-world challenges to operational excellence that their predecessors did, but the stakes are much higher than ever before. The constantly changing nature of plants and their internal and external environments can threaten safe, profitable plant operations. Uncontrolled upsets can cause start-up delays, production outages, severe equipment damage, and even catastrophic failures.
Modern integrated emergency/safety studies and training programmes need physical space in which to work, accurate simulation of the process upsets, and detailed simulations of the chemical reactions and fluid dynamics involved.
As a result, there are really only two solutions to performing dynamic and integrated simulation studies: either build real mock-ups, or carry out on-the-job simulations. There are disadvantageous with both, not least the great expense they incur.
Mock-ups are inflexible because every time the layout changes a new one has to be built. On-the-job simulations are considered too risky. And overall, neither can visualise the consequences of an accident, limiting the positive impact they could have on an operator’s mind.
Thanks to a technology breakthrough, IPS can now move users from control room “2D screen” training to a dynamic virtual environment (VE), using technology from the IPS dynamic simulation tool, DYNSIM. This allows operators in both the control room and the field to be trained as a team.
IPS engineers have infused VE with a host of human factors, making it realistic and simple to use. Field operators are completely immersed and perceive the VE world as if it was their daily place of work.
Simply by putting on the goggles, a field operator is able to see stereoscopically the spatial depth of his or her surroundings, walk-through the virtual plant and “feel it”. The data suit tracks movements, the 3D spatial sound contributes to naturally perceiving the surroundings, while data gloves and different “magic wands” enable the operator to move around and naturally “touch reality”.
Once immersed in the VE, any normal or abnormal situations can be simulated and experienced by operators. Any correct or wrong actions, either in the field or in the control room, are simulated rigorously in terms of process behaviour with a clear action/reaction perception. In practice, this means that all those abnormal situations that an operator feared and never dared to test in reality can be tested and that different plant behaviours and operator interactions can be understood.
Even expected and predictable upsets can be tested in depth, or even pushed forwards until an accidental sequence leads to a disaster: a virtual disaster is far better than a real one.
The strength of VE is that all aspects of plant safety can now be tested and experimented with, not just for the sake of training, but to help risk assessors better identify hazardous scenarios and, above all, to ensure that decision-makers make the right decisions at the right time.
As VE technology grows and develops, more and more process expertise will be embedded within it, improving the entire lifecycle of production plants and storage sites.
This is important, because research has shown that more than 90% of major accidents in high-risk sectors such as chemical and petrochemical production, can be attributed to human error and poor training.
In order to improve the safety of high-risk operations while preserving existing inherent safety levels, it is necessary to improve the way in which such systems are operated throughout the entire lifecycle.
With a new tool such as VE, operators will walk through, interact with and exchange opinions in trustworthy virtual reproductions of their working environments. They will experience emergency, maintenance and accidental scenarios that provide the possibility to see the consequences of erroneous actions.
As part of its work on VE, IPS is the leading simulation technology provider to VIRTHUALIS (VIrtual RealiTy and HUman Factors AppLications for Improving Safety), an EC funded research project on industrial safety. Running from May 2005 to May 2009, the Euro 15 million project is focused on developing new technologies that integrate virtual reality and human factors methods in order to improve safety in both production plants and storage sites.
The current prototype is the result of a group collaboration, the largest European Project on Industrial Safety financed by the EC under the 6th FP (Sixth Framework Programme) where Invensys is a partner lead and the technology provider for process simulation."