Situation awareness measurement of an ecological interface designed to operator support during alarm floods

• Alarms annunciation faster than operators response is an issue in process control.
• We propose a new interface to support operators in that situation.
• The new interface was evaluated under operators' usage in a simulation environment.
• Results show the new interface may improve operators' awareness of the situation.
• Better situation awareness may lead to greater safety and efficiency.

Alarm summary interfaces are lists of chronologically sorted alarms used in oil producing supervision programs for decades. When a great number of alarms are activated in a small interval of time – that is, an alarm flood – alarm summary ceases to be as useful to understand the process situation. New alarm systems and interfaces are necessary to support operators' decision when dealing with such alarm floods. Situational awareness is an important concept for process operators when making decisions. The application of Ecological Interface Design concepts can lead to better interface designs, especially in unanticipated situations. The aim of this work is to verify the usefulness of a new ecological alarm interface, called Advanced System of Intelligent Alarms (SAAI, the Portuguese acronym). SAAI displays alarms prioritised in real-time with relevant graphical information on process conditions. Professional operators' situational awareness is measured when using either the SAAI interface, or the alarm summary interface, connected to a dynamic simulator running a model of an oil production process. Measurement techniques used include objective and subjective rating approaches, and a proposed technique. Operators' situation awareness for SAAI interface has shown greater values under all techniques used, compared to alarm summary interface. Although the new interface implied that operators would have to look also at an extra monitor, results show that their situation awareness improved on average, and that situation awareness might be less impaired under alarm floods.Relevance to industrySituation awareness plays an important role in operators' decision-making process. Alarm systems are critical in complex process operation, and alarm floods may impair operators' decisions. A new alarm ecological interface designed to maintain operators' situational awareness under alarm floods may mean an improvement in operation safety and efficiency.