Abstract
The cognitive skill of knowing what is going on around you and using that information to predict future events is vital for drilling for oil and gas on offshore installations. This skill is known as Situation Awareness (SA), influencing subsequent decision making and performance. Failures of SA have been identified in a number of high profile well control disasters, most recently with Deep Water Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite SA being researched in other high risk, high reliability industries, such as aviation and nuclear power, very little research has investigated SA within the offshore drilling environment. Accurate SA is vital for safe and efficient performance on the drill deck with drillers being required to have high SA of the working environment and of their fellow crew members.
This research study uses cognitive task analysis techniques of observation and critical incident interviews to investigate drillers’ SA when working within a state of the art drilling simulator, with the goal of producing a framework of the required cognitive skills. As this is a new study, preliminary results will be discussed at the conference.
