Grant: Engage Grants Program

Maintenance is one of the most crucial and accident-prone activities in a process facility. It is directly linked to business and safety performance of the industry. The quality of maintenance is highly reliant on human involvement. Ineffective maintenance procedure and over-relying on human performance are major causes of maintenance related incidents. In the process facility, human error analysis is rarely carried out to improve the performance. Therefore, a human error assessment for the maintenance procedure is an important first step to minimize error and improve safety. IDBLUE is the producer of the world's first mobile, integrated Bluetooth RFID (radio-frequency identification) system. This instrument is ideal for situations involving human-machine procedure such as asset inspection, auditing, maintenance, and repair. To increase the confidence of using RFID to minimize human error, it is important for IDBLUE to validate and improve the design for overall reliability of the maintenance procedure. The proposed research is to undertake a human error assessment by identifying possible failure scenarios and assessing their likelihood. It further attempts to address these errors using an RFID system. Subsequently, a unique risk-based analysis will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the RFID system to improve the maintenance procedures. The results from this Engage research will serve as an important starting point for a long, sustaining collaboration between the IDBLUE and Safety and Risk Engineering Group to improve the safety in maintenance and other hazardous operations. This research collaboration would help IDBUE to gain an advantage over their global competitors. It will also be beneficial to the Canadian oil and gas, and onshore process industries.