The Abnormal Situation Management (ASM) Consortium is a long-running and active Honeywell-led research and development consortium of 12 companies and universities that are concerned about the negative effects of industrial accidents. An abnormal situation is a disturbance or series of disturbances in a process that causes plant operations to deviate from their normal operating state.

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  • The Abnormal Situation Management (ASM) Consortium is a long-running and active Honeywell-led research and development consortium of 12 companies and universities that are concerned about the negative effects of industrial accidents. An abnormal situation is a disturbance or series of disturbances in a process that causes plant operations to deviate from their normal operating state. The disturbances may be minimal or catastrophic, and cause production losses or, in serious cases, endanger human life. The result of an abnormal situation can be unnecessary costly due to production losses, off-spec product, equipment damage, or worse. Data collected by the consortium has demonstrated that operations practices can lead to costs of 3-8 percent of plant capacity due to unexpected events. Based on these data, the consortium has estimated the cost of lost production due to abnormal situations is at least $10 billion annually in the U.S. petrochemical industry. These estimates were developed early in the consortium's activities, and it is likely that today's costs are much higher. At the core of the ASM problem is the “Paradox of Automation”. As systems get more complicated, the operator is put into an untenable position. Why? First, as systems become more complex, they become more difficult to operate. One solution to operational difficulty is to add automation. But automation itself increases complexity. In addition to the increase in complexity, it is difficult to maintain operational skills in an automated environment. Those skills are precisely the ones that are most needed when the automated system is unable to handle a problem and the operator is required to intervene. Hence the consortium's focus has been on addressing the complex human-system interaction and factors that influence successful performance. Automation solutions have often been developed without consideration of the human that needs to interact with the solution. We can provide automation that effectively solves a problem under normal conditions, but when an anomaly occurs the complexity of the automation undermines the ability of people to intervene and correct the problem. One of the goals of the ASM R&D program is to define requirements for user-centered automation and support technologies
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  • The Abnormal Situation Management (ASM) Consortium is a long-running and active Honeywell-led research and development consortium of 12 companies and universities that are concerned about the negative effects of industrial accidents. An abnormal situation is a disturbance or series of disturbances in a process that causes plant operations to deviate from their normal operating state.
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  • Abnormal Situation Management
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