Control room operators in industries like oil refining, chemical production, or nuclear power plants are required to continuously monitor a plant's status and act on process deviations. Level 1 overview displays provide the operators with support for plant situation awareness in order to detect process deviations that are indicative of overall system health. This study compared three level 1 overview display prototypes (Calm Water, Heat Map, and Visual Thesaurus) developed by individual design teams of members of the Abnormal Situation Management (ASM) Consortium.
48 experienced control room operators participated in the study. Each experimental session lasted approximately 2 hours and consisted of a detailed training session followed by data collection. Operators completed process monitoring tasks on the level 1 overview displays while maintaining a healthy system in the secondary task (MAT-B II). Operator performance was assessed through multiple measures of accuracy, workload, and situation awareness. The results show that operators overall performed best on the Calm Water display and experienced the highest subjective workload with the Visual Thesaurus display. However, the visual Thesaurus display showed benefits for plant awareness. The Heat Map display was generally preferred by operators, while the Heat Map display was liked the least. The displays and their respective design elements are discussed in the context of ecological interface design and Rasmussen's skill, rules, and knowledge framework
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