Improvement of operator reliability using expert systems

There has been a considerable interest in expert systems during the last few years. These systems are traditionally used to aid decision-making in a wide range of applications. In the process industries we often rely on the human operator to take important decisions related to safety and reliability as well as more routine decisions concerned with plant performance. The paper reviews the use of expert systems in this type of application and contrasts the different requirements for support of decisions in both routine operation and rare event handling.