Unscheduled manual interventions in automated process control

Preliminary observations during a human factors analysis of a recently automated process plant revealed that operators sometimes assumed control over the production schedule, overriding the process computer. Interviews with senior managers suggested that such behaviour was rare, and only occurred under close supervision. This paper presents an analysis of these actions, which are referred to as ‘unscheduled manual interventions’ (UMls), through a series of three studies carried out in the plant. A questionnaire study revealed that UMIs occurred much more frequently than were claimed, and that they also imposed a heavy workload on operators. These observations were confirmed by a formal analysis of the process records for a full week's production, which allowed the authors to develop a taxonomy of UMIs according to their role in the control of either plant operations of the automatic schedule. It was hypothesized that such actions were motivated by a need for personal control in the increasingly automated ...

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