University-industry cooperative study on plant operations

Plant operation is an advanced activity of a knowledge intensive system com posed of various process equipment items, measurement and control instrumen ts, and human operators. Many studies have investigated various aspects of plant operation in the areas of chemical engineering, control engineering, human factors, and so on. However a more interdisciplinary approach is nece ssary to solve problems in actual and future plant operations. In this pape r, we will introduce activities related to plant operations in Japan. We wi ll describe some results obtained from collaborative studies between indust ry and academia. These results include design and evaluation methods of hum an interfaces in plant operation, computational models of the human informa tion processing of plant operators, and psychological approaches to measure the mental state of human operators, which have a great influence on the h uman performance. We are continuing to apply these results to create safer and more responsible plant operations in today's rapidly changing economic and social environment. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.