IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL REALITY FOR TRAINING AND DECISION MAKING: PRELIMINARY RESULTS OF EXPERIMENTS PERFORMED WITH A PLANT SIMULATOR

The use of immersive virtual reality (IVR) for training is an idea that has existed for a long time; the real, unclarified doubt about its use is whether it does really increase performance with respect to traditional methods such as classroom and on-the-job training. The most critical point of traditional training methods is the difficulty to train operators about a system’s deviations from nominal conditions. But even the more-advanced simulation-supported training approach, commercially represented by the operator training simulator (OTS), is not immune to flaws because it is affected both by the subjectivity of the assessment (making useless the operators’ benchmarking) and by the impossibility of training simultaneously the field operator (FOP) with the control room operator (CROP) (i.e., team training). The plant simulator (PS) enables overcoming the inherent limitations of the training methods. But the efficacy of using immersive virtual environments (IVEs) was, and to some extent still is, to be proved. This paper goes in that direction by explaining the preliminary results of an experiment campaign performed in a PS, which demonstrates the clear benefit of using IVR for training (field) operators. The paper even highlights that, if a PS is used, the benefits are not just limited to the training but can also be extended to operations management