Incorporating human factors engineering methods in the system life cycle of offshore oil and gas industries

2017 IChemE. This paper highlights the importance of integration of human factors engineering (HFE) principles throughout phases of system life cycle of offshore energy industries. Human error is found to be the most common cause of offshore incidents according to the analysis of BSEE incident data. While human operators are mostly blamed for making errors and mistakes at the sharp end of a system, accident models and systems theory tell us that the cause of incidents are triggered much earlier in the system life cycle by the blunt end or managers and designers. Therefore, this proceeding provides HFE considerations for each step in system life as well as available HFE tools and methods to be employed. For corporate organizations to buy in proposed HFE methods, meta-analysis of cost-effectiveness for early HFE implementation is briefly presented.

Incorporating human factors engineering methods in the system life cycle of offshore oil and gas industries Conference Paper