The University of South-Eastern Norway (USN) is leading the EU's collaborative project called Enhancing Human Performance in Complex Socio-Technical Systems – Enhance, which deals with safety in hazardous industries.
Recently, partners from seven countries participated in the «Loss Prevention Asia 2023» conference, where USN is a co-organiser. The large conference brings together academic and industrial experts from all over the world. The purpose is to share experiences, best practices and advanced methods for managing human factors that affect safety and risk.
“While academic research has its place, this conference offers a platform to directly impact industrial practice. We profiled USN and increased interest in Enhance from academia and industry, as well as promoted collaboration opportunities”, says professor and project coordinator for Enhance, Salman Nazir.
Returning from Asia with useful experience
Among other things, the partners in the Enhance project will map how humans and technology work together in demanding situations. The goal is to find new knowledge that can improve safety in hazardous industries, thereby saving lives and reducing costs for the processing industry and maritime industry, among others.
“We want to find out how to avoid accidents through new training and evaluation methods, which are required in line with increased technological complexity”, explains Nazir, adding:
“The German partner RWE Power AG and Norwegian partners Kongsberg Digital and Kongsberg Maritime have all welcomed researchers from the academic partners in Enhance. As a result, they have benefited from the interaction between industry and academia within the framework of the project’s objectives of increasing safety in hazardous industries. The industry partners have inspired industries to recognise the value of such tools developed at research institutions and have started implementing them.”
Nazir believes the Enhance project reaped several benefits from the conference in Asia, which was held at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center in Malaysia.
“The funding is aimed at knowledge exchange, competence transfer and interaction between different mindsets among universities, subject areas and sectors. In my view, this conference has taken another step towards motivating the sector, in addition to the Enhance partners, to integrate new training and evaluation methods into their safety solutions”, says Nazir.
Collaboration with industry giants
The Asian conference was also attended by major industry giants such as Petronas, DNV, Vysus, Sphere and Gexcon.
The discussions spanned a spectrum of topics, from organisational culture and the role of artificial intelligence to system safety and risk management.
“Many of the discussions revolved around the fact that humans still play a key role in system safety, even in the present era of advanced technology and automation. The conference essentially bridged knowledge gaps and stayed true to the project’s core purpose.”
The main organiser of the Loss Prevention conference is Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, which is one of the partners in the Enhance project.
