Establishing Human Performance Improvements and Economic Benefit for a Human-Centered Operator Interface: An Industrial Evaluation

Abstract

A controlled comparison of a human-centered operator interface to that of a traditional distributed control system interface was conducted to establish the human performance improvement. Twenty-one professional petrochemical plant operators completed a series of matching process upset scenarios on their respective plants' high-fidelity training simulators. Each scenario contained an equipment or process failure previously experienced in the real plants. The results indicated that operators using the human-centered design completed scenarios an average of 7.5 minutes faster (41% improvement over the traditional interface), successfully dealt with failures in 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 then used as input to a Monte Carlo simulation that estimated the economic benefit for the human-centered interface at $1,090,000 CAD per year for a plant of comparable size.