Research Work:
A Design Pattern Language to Assist the Design of Alarm Visualizations for Operating Control Systems
| Context | Under all controlled process conditions, even during minor disturbances, the human operator would like to know all key alarms that are directly safety related and important process alarms related to safety critical systems. |
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| Problem | The human operator needs to know at all times all key alarms in order to decide which alarms to deal with. |
| Solution | Present key alarms in tiled layouts in a spatially dedicated position in which the same kind of alarm is always displayed in the same location. Arrange tiles in a grid, where all the tiles have the same width or same height and all the tiles in a group are separated by splitters all with the same orientation. |
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| Rationale | Tiled layouts help operators to perceive alarms activity at a glance. As the same alarm is usually displayed in the same location, they also support human pattern matching [19]. In this way, over time, the operator may come to associate certain patterns of alarms with certain types of fault, thus frequent and familiar failures are likely to be readily recognizable. (Endsley, M. R. (2003). Designing for situation awareness: An approach to user-centered design CRC Press.) |
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