Establishing Operator PerformanceImprovements and Economic Benefit for anASM? Operator Interface

摘要

The rapidly changing distributed control systems (DCS) of today's industry present a challenge to,and an opportunity for,increased Operator Effectiveness.Critical to operator effectiveness is theneed to support the necessary interactions between the console operators,their control system,and the process being controlled.Effectively supporting the console operator and the tasks s/he isintended to perform is increasingly difficult as more process data from the field and moreinformation from outside the control system are delivered to the console.This paper presents anoperator interface design approach,based on research and implementation by Honeywell'sAbnormal Situation Management? (ASM?1) Consortium.This ASM operator interface approachforms the core part of a decision support system that can aid operators in preventing andminimizing the impact of unplanned plant disturbances and in improving plant performance.Inaddition,this paper will discuss a controlled comparison of the ASM operator interface to that of atraditional distributed control system interface conducted to establish the human performanceimprovement.Twenty-one professional petrochemical plant operators completed a series ofmatching process upset scenarios on their respective plants' high-fidelity training simulators.Eachscenario contained an equipment or process failure previously experienced in the real plants.Theresults indicated that operators using the ASM interface design completed scenarios an average of7.5 minutes faster (41% improvement over the traditional interface),successfully dealt with failuresin 96% of the cases (a 26% improvement),and recognized the presence of the failure before the first process alarm in 48% of the cases (a 38% improvement).These performance results were thenused as input to a Monte Carlo simulation that estimated the economic benefit for the ASM interfaceat $870,000 USD per year for a plant of comparable size.