Human Factors and Non-Technical Skills: Towards an Immersive Simulation-Based Training Framework for Offshore Drilling Operations

Human factors are identified as the major contributor to oil and gas drilling and other operations related accidents. Offshore oil and gas operations involve complex scenarios and decision-making with potentially catastrophic consequences. The current simulation-based training modules are often criticized for their lack of objective and validated measures for human factors and non-technical skills. There is also a need to include measures for enhanced situational awareness and decision-making for the offshore drilling crew. In this study, we present holistic human-centered training framework equipped with assessment techniques to analyses situational awareness of partcipants in customized well-control operations. The training exercise used in this work included real-time well control operation customized for drilling break and kick detection scenarios. The assessment approach consisted of eye-tracking data analysis, questionnaire analysis, checklist score analysis, and communication log analysis. After individual analysis from each technique, a new framework was developed to triangulate results from each technique to provide a comprehensive assessment. The participants included seven group of novices and one group of experts. The preliminary results indicate significant differences between the situation awareness and performance of participants. Furthermore, there were observed notable differences between the perceptual, comprehensive, and projection ability of novices and experts in routine jobs on a drilling platform. The eye-tracking data features included fixation count and fixation duration, and it was inferred that eye-tracking results can be representative of cognitive abilities of the partcipants. Furthermore, the fixation count and duration results were highly correlated with the checklist scores. Overall, the adopted methodology in this study have potential to open new avenues for human- centered training framework and improvement in traditional assessment approach. Furthermore, it can also be helpful in understanding of cognitive responses of the offshore professionals.