RESEARCH ARTICLE
Operator Decision Making in the Minerals Industry
Tim Horberry*, Tristan Cooke, Xilin Li, Garry Marling
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2011Volume: 4
First Page: 103
Last Page: 111
Publisher Id: TOERGJ-4-103
DOI: 10.2174/1875934301104010103
Article History:
Received Date: 05/11/2010Revision Received Date: 17/05/2011
Acceptance Date: 17/05/2011
Electronic publication date: 27/8/2011
Collection year: 2011
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The minerals industry is a complex work domain where people, procedures and equipments need to interact safely and efficiently. Given the importance of the human element in this industry, it is surprising that, to date, comparatively few studies have been published that specifically examine operator decision making. This paper presents two ongoing case studies from different sectors of mining and minerals processing that are drawing heavily on ‘Naturalistic Decision Making’ (NDM) approaches and methods. The case studies involve analyzing incidents using the Critical Decision Method and how Naturalistic Decision Making methods and design processes can help improve interfaces in process control. Following this, the paper will discuss this work and comment on the worth of the overall NDM approach to the minerals industry. Some of the lessons learnt will be highlighted and potential future research recommended.