Behavioral analysis of control room operator during plant operation using display interaction and eye gaze information for effective plant monitoring

Abstract

Safety in process plants is at top in list of issues that are yet to be resolved fully. Recent accidents and their impact on economy,environment and human lives have raised this issue once again. There are many causes for such accidents and many reports have been published to explain why such accidents had happened. All of these have a common point of view which is related to control room. Human operator is at the heart of control room as operator is responsible for proper monitoring and controlling of plant by observing information from resources present inside control room. A lot of information, sudden bombardment with lot of alarms under abnormal situations makes operator paralyzed. A variety of methods are available in literature such as root cause analysis, removal of alarm chattering etc. to help operator and make control room much more friendly to operator. But their implementation and usefulness in process plant is yet to see a significant level of success. Usefulness of these methods depends on the extent in which these methods can help operators. In this study an attempt has been made towards understanding behavior of control room operators. A Graphical Display Unit(GUI) is designed based on display panel’s outlook in Distributed Control System(DCS) room.Participants are asked to perform duty of operators where they are exposed to abnormal situations and asked to control plant through suitable actions. This is for the first time eye tracker has been used for this kind of study. A variety of man machine interface data has been gathered. Results related to effect of training, effect of more exposure to GUI etc. have been observed. Moreover a metric for operator’s performance based on GUI interaction data has also been formulated. Eye gaze data has been used for identifying key factors for effective controlling have been identified at preliminary level.