Drillers’ Cognitive Skills Monitoring Task

Drilling incidents have emphasized that offshore drillers require a high level of cognitive skills, including situation awareness and decision making, to maintain safe and efficient well control. Although a number of tools for supporting operators’ cognition are available in other high-risk industries, there is no specific tool for drilling. We developed a prototype monitoring task simulating drilling scenarios, Drillers’ Situation Awareness Task, with drilling experts and piloted with 14 drilling personnel. Preliminary results suggest that it is viable as a tool for examining drillers’ cognition and has the potential for training and formatively assessing cognitive skills in drilling