Producing plants must be safe and reliable. Plant Safety is strongly dependent on how well people responsible for running the facility (control room operators; CRO) are aware of its operation. Improving the understanding and awareness is the goal of any training to CROs, hence, their trainings must he carried out in an environment as similar as possible to the one they will find in their work, like airplane pilots do with flight simulators, in order to be minimally qualified to carry out their job tasks. And this is the objective of the Operator Training Systems (OTS) (Feliu, 2015): deliver training to CROs in a replica of their working environment; maximizing its effectiveness. Matching the availability of the training facilities (comprising instructor) with the one of the CRO can be crucial in easing to achieve an on-time learning activity. That's why, in the traditional approach to the OTS, these training systems live in a training room, typically close to the actual control room they emulate. The universalization of internet connections, even in remote locations, and the evolution of the software technologies to support and enable mobility bring new opportunities to training systems. Those OTS systems that had to he physically deployed at every site where operators were trained can now he remote by combining some of the latest developments: e-learning standards (like the well-established SCORM (ADL, 2005 or AICC), sound software applications used to develop and deploy OTS (dynamic process simulators, control system emulators...) (Fiske, 2007) and the latest technologies on virtualization. This distributed framework does not only facilitate scalability of the training sessions or overall system maintenance, but it also grants access to comprehensive training to more people in many different conditions, even to people in the same company that are in charge of similar processes. The return of investment in training and education is then maximized by easing the access to many more people. With this new infrastructure it is also possible for companies which will not usually look into developing a fully fledged OTS because of its cost; to get access to subscription type of trainings, where, for a fraction of the cost for an OTS, they can train their operators in rigorous plant models, closely resembling their actual plants. Analysis show that, the usage of OTS improves operator effectiveness in 31% (Komulainen, Nordhus, Nordsteien and Sarmerud; 2012); the usage of the new web based OTS, even when working with a similar model and not the actual, it is able to capture most of the value of a traditional OTS. The advantages of the new solutions also bring the possibility to process licensors to even demonstrate in practical terms the benefits, characteristics and actual operation of the licensed processes to actual and potential clients. The OTS solution presented here takes advantage of a software architecture which increases and distributes the availability of the training facility, enabling its access to CROs from other company sites, from other time zones, and even from outside the company premises. This solution has been implemented and used by a European plant operator training institution, and two European chemical process licensors.
