Abstract
The year of 2015 is the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong Section. Ten years ago, Hong Kong had a representative, but did not function as a section. I was invited by Professor Derek Atherton to reform the section; the section was formally registered in Hong Kong as a local section of InstMC in October 2005, running under the sectional committee of Hong Kong. I was delighted to be elected as the first chairman.
Control room usually contains display units, analog and digital indicators, and various instruments providing the information of the plant/process to the operator. The operator is required to take appropriate control action based on the displayed information through the switches, joystick, push bottoms, and different manipulators to operate the plant/process. Understanding of interactions among humans and those elements of a control system in order to optimize human well-being and control performance is one of the important aspects for the design of control panels and control rooms.
It is my pleasure to introduce the following three papers in relation to the design of displays and controls facilitating performance and reducing human errors due to a mismatch between the expectations of the operators
The first paper is on the interface design and display-control compatibility. The paper provides pragmatic recommendations to assist interface designers to improve operational system effectiveness and safety by considering the various aspects of display-control compatibility necessary for effective human–machine interface design.
The second paper is on human factors in control room modernization. The paper introduces the application of human factors engineering to evaluate the usability and safety of the hybrid human-system interfaces developed for the conventional main control room during the process of modernization.
Visual search is commonly performed in the control rooms of several industries such as nuclear power plants, flight control, security screening, and monitoring. The third paper provides an insight of the effects of target prevalence and speech intelligibility on visual search performance.