Abstract
Automation is increasing to improve efficiency, cost/benefit and safety. Human interventions are often needed and must be designed. The need for standards is critical to handle the challenges of automation and support meaningful human control. This need for standards in the petroleum industry is based on: (i) a literature review including study of accidents involving automation from shipping, aviation, transport and petroleum; (ii) interviews of industry experts and users of drilling automation; (iii) a discussion of standards with human factors (HF) experts and key stakeholders in Norway. The study shows the need to prioritize HF in the development of automation. Exploration of accidents identified gaps in meaningful human control and learning. This gap is due to technology optimism, poor design of HF and poor learning from human factors. User centred design based on the experience of operators is necessary to get systems with meaningful human control. Experiences indicates stepwise automation in collaboration with users has improved user satisfaction, efficiency and safety. Automation, poor human machine interfaces and poor sensemaking may create additional gaps between work as done vs imagined, that must be addressed. This paper highlights three main issues: -Successful automation has benefited from user centred design; - Learning from accidents must include the gap in human factors knowledge and poor design; - Human Factors principles and standards are needed from regulators and industry.