Abstract of Thesis presented at COPPE/UFRJ as a partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Science (D.Sc.)

Using Situational Awareness Measurement Techniques for Evaluating Alarm Ecological Interface

Eduardo Navarra Satuf

March/2016

Advisors:

Eugenius Kaszkurewicz Roberto Schirru

Department:

Eletrical Engineering

      For decades, alarm summary interfaces, lists of chronologically sorted alarms, have been used in production supervision and control systems. A great number of alarms activated in a small interval of time, an alarm flood, impairs operators situation awareness (SA). An alarm summary shows little or no information on the relative importance of alarms, neither on which data are relevant to comprehend the situation and to foresee the process evolution in the near future. New alarm systems and interfaces are necessary to help keeping operator’s SA. Measuring the SA, though, is not trivial, since SA is a cognitive property. The Ecological Interface Design (EID) approach can lead to better interface designs, especially under unanticipated events. In this work, professional process operators' situational awareness is measured while performing a simulated task. Techniques used to measure SA include objective and subjective rating approaches, and a proposed technique. A new ecological alarm interface, called Intelligent Advanced System of Alarms (SAAI, the Portuguese acronym), and the more traditional alarm summary interface were managed by the operators. Although the new interface implied looking at an extra monitor, results show that situation awareness improved on average and might be less impaired under alarm floods, improving safety.