The overall objective is to reduce hazards in production plant and storage sites by addressing end-users’ practical safety issues, such as training control room and field operators, designing proper alarm systems, training teams to cope with emergencies, assessing the impact of plant modifications on operators’ reliability, helping managers to see the impact of their decisions on sharp-end operators’ daily work, through the development of an innovative technology.

The breakthrough offered by the HFCapiltal technology relates to the opportunity of moving from static paper-based to dynamic virtual simulations activities for capitalisation, tests & design, and transfert (training and routine improvement) of HF capital.

The new technology proposed by HFCapital mege Human Factors (HF) knowledge and Virtual Reality (VR) technologie.

The added values of dynamic virtual simulation tools:

- To simulate/work on rare situations (degraded, dangerous)

- To repeat situations, with constraints

- To evaluate the real understanding of operators

- To work on “purified” situations

- To locate knowledge in a context

- To show the consequences of a variation to the standards, by showing the dangerous phenomena which are associated there (“in pedagogy, it is necessary to go until the accident”)

- Not to mobilize the equipment/installations

- To avoid moving the trainees on plants

The key issue addressed: Safety analyses like HAZOP, FMEA, Fault Tree (FT), Event Tree (ET), Preliminary Hazard Analysis (PHA), Task Analysis (TA), in which critical situations are just imagined by safety analysts, will be moulded in such a way that HF concepts can permeate people’s mind through images. In particular this will allow safety analysts to easily and quickly understand and integrate HF concepts into safety analyses. Indeed, HF issues are difficult to communicate, to understand and to envision due to their complex nature. By immerging sharp-end operators, teams, safety analysts, managers into Virtual Environments (VEs) suitably modelled for the specific analysis to perform, it will be possible to “almost” experience safety-critical situations amplifying people capabilities and enabling them to suitably exploit HF concepts when performing safety analyses.