The paper describes a new human-interface system design method by combining the conception of Multilevel Flow Model and Ecological Interface Design to support operators’ fault diagnosis in the complex plant system. Modern man-made systems are always achieving many complex automatic and intelligent tasks so that they are becoming more and more complex and can be hardly understood by operators, who should be the primary role in system operating. This situation presents a big challenge to the operating support system that it should present the complex system in a direct and clear way to operators to and make operators understand the internal interaction of the system especially in the abnormal status to ensure the operating safety. The Multilevel Flow Model based on the idea of ”Abstraction Hierarchy”, aiming at decompressing a system by means-end and part-whole way, can be used to represent a complex system in a standard way and perform intelligent operating tasks such as fault diagnosis and process control. Ecological Interface Design, which based on the human cognitive properties, can present the internal interaction of the system in a direct way. This paper combines this two interface design conceptions to achieve two aspects, intelligent fault diagnosis and direct presentation of causal relationship of operating parameters, to support operators’ fault diagnosis in complex plant system. The design method is applied to a PWR power plant in this paper as an application example.
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