Integrating Human Factors into Petroleum Engineering's Curriculum: Essential Training for Students

Abstract

The contribution of Human Factors, in complex commercial and contractual environments like the oil and gas industry, is fully-fledged and admitted. With the understanding that there were cascading failures due to human errors, the root cause analysis of accidents reveals that many of them were preventable. The Human Factors has not been accentuated thoroughly in this industry, and, traditionally, the focus has been on personnel knowledge and competence. In addition, lack of emphasis on Human Factors in academia as a backbone of the industry could be another reason for this negligence. Therefore, the proper academic training, which thoroughly emphasizes the non-technical skills (NTSs) in conjunction with Human Factors, is lacking in the curriculum of complex engineering programs like petroleum. For the first time, at the University of Oklahoma, the Human Factors in Oil and Gas Operations class was offered. The offered course fulfilled the mission of training petroleum engineering students to make an impact on oil and gas industry. In this class, the students were introduced to the required NTSs in the drilling operation. The course content was designed to include technical concepts in drilling such as well barriers' philosophy, challenges in well flow control, plugging and abandonment operation, and kick detection. Also, several NTSs include effective communication, decision-making, situational awareness, teamwork, individual and group scenarios based well control training. The course content reassures that young professionals gain applicable NTSs and carry them to their work environment asserting safe and environmentally sustainable operations. A novel training approach was offered to integrate the theories of Human Factors with NTSs through the virtual reality simulation experience. The state-of-the-art Virtual Reality Drilling Simulator (VRDS) facility coupled with a commercial drilling simulation software to facilitate the scenario-based training for students.

An Eye Tracking Based Framework for Safety Improvement of Offshore Operations

“…The ocular movement analysis of the personnel in the surgery room has been implemented to understand the complex cognitive processes and their complexity during surgery (Topalli & Cagiltay, 2018;Wilson et al, 2011). Besides that, eye tracking analyses have also been implemented recently in Human Factors course at the University of Oklahoma, where the real-time scenarios were simulated for well control training (Dadmohammadi et al, 2017).…”

Eye tracking data analytics in virtual reality training: Application in Deepwater Horizon oil drilling operation

“…Figure 1 shows the overview of the OUDSC equipped with three NOV Drilling Virtual Simulator chairs. The simulator setup with the control chairs resembles the actual drilling rig floor (Dadmohammadi et al, 2017). The approximate cost to build the VR simulator was approximately one million US dollars.…”

Proposal of a learning tool for introduction to petroleum engineering subject and recommendations for modification of petroleum engineering curricula in Colombian universities

“…The human factor is also a key player in performing quality and successful operations within petroleum industry, so soft skills or non-technical skills (NTS's) such as effective communication, decision-making, situational awareness and teamwork should be included in university curricula; a good approach was done by Oklahoma University which opened a new course on the Human Factors in Oil and Gas operations in order to introduce the NTS's required in drilling operations by means of a scenario-based methodology [12].…”