Evaluating the effectiveness of anticipatory alarms for proactive process monitoring

Abstract

Alarm systems in chemical plants alert process operators to deviations in process variables beyond predetermined limits. With increased complexity in modern chemical plants, there is an increasing importance of developing effective alarm management system. We have previously developed Anticipatory Alarms (AA), which is a predictive tool that provides operators with anticipatory information on alarms to help them be proactive in monitoring as they are alerted early on potential problems. The next step is to present this anticipatory information in a user-friendly manner through the AA display. This paper focuses on the human-computer interface design of the AA display. Various aspects of the display design have been tested in a series of human factors/usability experiments, where human subjects use different variants of the AA display to perform certain tasks and their performance reveals which display is the most effective. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.