Development of prototype system on workers’ awareness information assessment for safety management in petroleum facilities

Potential risks threatening labor safety are increasing at many industrial plants in Japan. These risks are brought by such factors as changing age structure, fewer opportunities for manual operation due to advancing automation, and fewer opportunities for experiencing trouble. One urgent task facing the industry is to teach young workers so that they can be aware of potential hazards to safety. The task is urgent because the Japanese industry is about to see in a few years a massive retirement of Japanese baby boomers, who possess abundant experience and play a major role in training young workers. To succeed in the task, one possible solution is the one consisting of the following three steps. 1) Develop a prototype system for collecting and assessing information about what potential hazards they are aware of in their everyday work. 2) Identify some important features from the information gathered from experienced labor, and establish an education system based on that result. 3) Develop and implement a training system to enable workers to be aware of potential hazards. This paper focuses on the first of the three agendas above. The system we developed is to gather information about potential hazards that workers are actually aware of, and to sort out and analyze that information. It is not a brand-new idea to collect information about not only the incidents that actually happened but also potential hazards that might cause an incident in the future. However, past attempts failed to formalize information, only providing open-ended questions asking writers to explain in their own terms what possible hazards they were aware of. This makes it difficult to make use of the information in an integrated way. Thus, they failed to collect information in the way that the information could contribute to resolving the second and third of the three agendas above. Therefore, we study on how to gather the information potential risk in the workplace make a prototype of the evaluation method of collection results, intended to lead to safety education and training increase the level of awareness of the situation of workers, as shown 2), 3), First, we sort out and categorized about 2,500 reports gathered in a petroleum plant for the past one year. The reports include information about potential hazards to safety, incidents that actually took place, and basic facts about incidents. Next, we analyzed the information based on the past academic researches on labor safety and then summarize the list factors and countermeasures related to occupational safety. Thought the item was based on this list, we considering items described in the potential incident reports.