Education and Training to Enhance Risk Perception and Safety Culture in High-risk Plant

Abstract

The growing technological complexity, due to the advent of Industry 4.0, allows high-risk plants to be designed with safer operation thanks to intelligent control and supervision systems. However, to seize the opportunities that intelligent technologies offer in terms of risk reduction, efforts must be directed towards increasingly human-centered design and an evolution of organizational models. The environment surrounding the worker is increasingly interconnected and integrated with intelligent systems, so that risk scenarios are changing and consequently the skills of the user who will interact with them. In this innovative and interconnected context, in fact, the worker’s skills profile is also changing in order to allow him/her to act in dynamic and unexpected situations safely also thanks to advanced technologies. This new complexity of intelligent environments and systems requires new educational and training interventions. These interventions should be aimed at enhancing worker’s ability to perceive and identify elements of context, which could represent risk sources not only for their intrinsic hazards (e.g. hot surfaces, cutting edges, chemicals etc.) but also for their capacity to modify risk scenarios related, for example, to potential impact of their mechanisms on human operators or other technological equipment. A sound approach for providing worker s the necessary skills to face this challenge is based on innovative education and training methodologies where operators live an immersive experience of the interconnected context through simulation tools and realistic interaction with context elements and agents in order to test and become aware of hidden dynamics related to socio-technological systems evolution.