ISA book advances the role of situation management

Written by Douglas H. Rothenberg, Ph.D., a globally recognised expert in alarm management and operator support technology, the book explores control room management as a discipline, focusing on the applicable tools, technology, and methodologies that foster safer, more effective control room functioning and improved industrial production.

Situation management is the sum total of the real-time decisions and actions that the operator makes that determine whether or not the enterprise operates safely and productively. These include accurately and appropriately assessing the current operating environment, transforming that assessment into needed action for proper management of abnormal situations, and validating the effectiveness of the action.

“Properly understood and executed, it is a game changer in safe and effective operation of industrial plants and operations,” states Rothenberg. “It advances a firm technical framework that ties together all of the traditional individual aspects (e.g., procedures, the human machine interface, control room design, and more) into a technology to understand and design effective control room management operations. This is a unified approach with explicit tools to deliver situation management to control room operators. The tools to see problems are followed by the tools to manage them.”

New contributions, Rothenberg points out, are the concepts and technology of weak signals and their use to supplement the alarm system and cover situations that alarms are not intended or able to manage.

“Weak signals are small indicators of things that don’t appear quite right,” he explains. “They can be discovered everywhere; understanding and exploiting them will lead to valuable clues and the ability to confirm something likely going amiss.”

Rothenberg emphasises the importance and relevance of the book to managers, supervisors, operators, human factors engineers, safety personnel, and technicians in industrial enterprises and operation centers as well as to regulators, specialists, engineers, system designers, and trainers at commercial firms (controls equipment manufacturers, A&E firms, systems integrators) who provide monitoring and controls hardware, software and technology for end users.