Integrating VR and knowledge-based technologies to facilitate the development of operator training systems and scenarios to improve process safety

Process safety can be regarded of paramount importance since any malfunction or mal-operation of a hazardous processing plant may lead to accidents that will cause damage to properties, injury to people and may even result in fatalities. This project investigates how Virtual Reality (VR) and knowledge-based (in particular rule-based) technologies may be combined to provide an effective tool for implementing operator training systems to deal with different scenarios for any given plant. VR is one of the fastest developing visualisation technologies. Through VR, a trainee can be immersed in the realistic simulated environment, which is helpful in providing operating experience without having to worry about causing any accidents or operational difficulties of the real plant. However, it is necessary to provide flexible ways of capturing and specifying the expertise for evaluating the action of the trainee without hard coding everything into the simulation system. The proposed solution is to couple the VR simulation tool with a knowledge-based tool, or more specifically a rule-based tool. The VR tool is responsible purely for the user interaction and updating the state of the simulated plant. On the other hand, a set of expert rules is specified in the rule-base in a high level declarative format. Every time the plant changes state, the rule-based tool will check the new state of the plant against its set of rules. If the plant is in an undesirable or unsafe state then an appropriate warning will be issued or an appropriate message will be passed to the VR tool. Different training scenarios can be easily developed by changing the plant description and/or the rule set. This paper describes the overall system architecture and provides some details about the separate tools. An example is used to illustrate the working of the system. On-going research issues will also be highlighted and discussed. © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group