Situation awareness measurement of an ecological interface designed to operator support during alarm floods

Abstract Alarm summary interfaces are lists of chronologically sorted alarms used in oil producing supervision programs for decades. When a great number of alarms are activated in a small interval of time – that is, an alarm flood – alarm summary ceases to be as useful to understand the process situation. New alarm systems and interfaces are necessary to support operators' decision when dealing with such alarm floods. Situational awareness is an important concept for process operators when making decisions. The application of Ecological Interface Design concepts can lead to better interface designs, especially in unanticipated situations. The aim of this work is to verify the usefulness of a new ecological alarm interface, called Advanced System of Intelligent Alarms (SAAI, the Portuguese acronym). SAAI displays alarms prioritised in real-time with relevant graphical information on process conditions. Professional operators' situational awareness is measured when using either the SAAI interface, or the alarm summary interface, connected to a dynamic simulator running a model of an oil production process. Measurement techniques used include objective and subjective rating approaches, and a proposed technique. Operators' situation awareness for SAAI interface has shown greater values under all techniques used, compared to alarm summary interface. Although the new interface implied that operators would have to look also at an extra monitor, results show that their situation awareness improved on average, and that situation awareness might be less impaired under alarm floods. Relevance to industry Situation awareness plays an important role in operators' decision-making process. Alarm systems are critical in complex process operation, and alarm floods may impair operators' decisions. A new alarm ecological interface designed to maintain operators' situational awareness under alarm floods may mean an improvement in operation safety and efficiency.

[1]  Colin F. Mackenzie,et al.  SPECIAL SECTION: Task Complexity in Emergency Medical Care and Its Implications for Team Coordination , 1996, Hum. Factors.

[2]  Guy H. Walker,et al.  Measuring Situation Awareness in complex systems: Comparison of measures study , 2009 .

[3]  Malcolm Powell,et al.  Human Factors in Control Room Operations in Mineral Processing , 2012 .

[4]  G. A. Jamieson,et al.  Ecological Interface Design for Petrochemical Process Control: An Empirical Assessment , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans.

[5]  David B Durbin,et al.  Human Factors Assessment of the UH-60M Crew Station During the Early User Demonstration No. 2 (EUD2) , 2005 .

[6]  Kim J. Vicente,et al.  Coping with Human Errors through System Design: Implications for Ecological Interface Design , 1989, Int. J. Man Mach. Stud..

[7]  Mica R. Endsley,et al.  Measurement of Situation Awareness in Dynamic Systems , 1995, Hum. Factors.

[8]  A. C. Pereira,et al.  Operator Trainer System for the Petrobras P-26 Semi-Submersible Oil and Gas Production Unit , 2009 .

[9]  Philip M. Myers,et al.  Layer of Protection Analysis – Quantifying human performance in initiating events and independent protection layers , 2013 .

[10]  Zhizhong Li,et al.  Task complexity: A review and conceptualization framework , 2012 .

[11]  Guy H. Walker,et al.  All at sea: An ergonomic analysis of oil production platform control rooms , 2014 .

[12]  Catherine M. Burns,et al.  Evaluation of Ecological Interface Design for Nuclear Process Control: Situation Awareness Effects , 2008, Hum. Factors.

[13]  R. M. Taylor,et al.  Situational Awareness Rating Technique (Sart): The Development of a Tool for Aircrew Systems Design , 2017 .

[14]  M. Endsley.  Situation Awareness Misconceptions and Misunderstandings , 2015 .

[15]  Neville A. Stanton,et al.  Is SA shared or distributed in team work? An exploratory study in an intelligence analysis task , 2011 .

[16]  Dal Vernon C. Reising,et al.  Addressing alarm flood situations in the process industries through alarm summary display design and alarm response strategy , 2014 .

[17]  Xiaojun Wu,et al.  Validation of “alarm bar” alternative interface for digital control panel design: A preliminary experimental study , 2016 .

[18]  Valerie J. Gawron.  Human performance measures handbook , 2000 .

[19]  Kim J. Vicente,et al.  Ecological interface design for petrochemical applications: supporting operator adaptation , 2001 .

[20]  Mica R. Endsley,et al.  Toward a Theory of Situation Awareness in Dynamic Systems , 1995, Hum. Factors.