ABSTRACT

Human error plays a predominant role in accidents in many domains including the oil & gas industry. Various studies claim that 80% to 85% of all accidents across domains from aerospace to traffic and manufacturing originate from human error. Ensuring safe operation requires the active mental involvement of the operator. Human failure therefore often has a cognitive basis. Cognitive science and engineering is a new interdisciplinary field that studies the mind and its processes. In this talk, I will provide a panoramic view of our research on the role human error in chemical plant accidents. As an example, we will discuss patterns in the eye gaze and pupil dilation data of DCS operators in the control room that seem to foretell human error.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Rajagopalan Srinivasan is Professor of Chemical Engineering and Institute Chair at IIT Gandhinagar. Previously, he was with the National University of Singapore and AStars Institute of Chemical and Engineering Sciences. Raj received his B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology Madras and PhD from Purdue University, both in Chemical Engineering. He was a research associate in Honeywell Technology Center, Minneapolis, before joining NUS. Rajs research program is targeted towards developing artificial intelligence inspired systems engineering approaches for process safety and enterprise optimization.