Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Quantifying situation awareness of control room operators using eye-gaze behavior
    (01-01-2017)
    Bhavsar, Punitkumar
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    In an attempt to improve process safety, today's plants deploy sophisticated automation and control strategies. Despite these, accidents continue to occur. Statistics indicate that human error is the predominant contributor to accidents today. Traditionally, human error is only considered during process hazard analysis. However, this discounts the role of operators in abnormal situation management. Recently, with the goal to develop proactive strategies to prevent human error, we utilized eye tracking to understand the situation awareness of control room operators. Our previous studies reveal the existence of specific eye gaze patterns that reveal operators’ cognitive processes. This paper further develops this cognitive engineering based approach and proposes novel quantitative measures of operators’ situation awareness. The proposed measures are based on eye gaze dynamics and have been evaluated using experimental studies. Results demonstrate that the proposed measures reliably identify the situation awareness of the participants during various phases of abnormal situation management.
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    Publication
    Recent developments towards enhancing process safety: Inherent safety and cognitive engineering
    (02-09-2019) ; ;
    Iqbal, Mohd Umair
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    Nemet, Andreja
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    Kravanja, Zdravko
    Safety is paramount aspect of any chemical plant. In this paper various approaches to enhance process safety are evaluated. The specific enhancements include process design methodologies for improving inherent safety and cognitive engineering to reduce human errors. Their aim is to reduce the number and the consequences of possible deviation events, which depends predominantly on quality of the equipment and human error potential. The consequences are linked to the substances and their inventories. An inherent safety index is used to assess the properties of substances and process units while the potential for human error is characterized using various physiological measures. Our research indicates that application of process synthesis methodologies for simultaneous inherent safety assessment and advanced cognitive engineering approaches for human error reduction will lead to enhanced process safety.
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    Publication
    Toward Preventing Accidents in Process Industries by Inferring the Cognitive State of Control Room Operators through Eye Tracking
    (05-02-2018)
    Das, Laya
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    Iqbal, Mohd Umair
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    Bhavsar, Punitkumar
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    While modern chemical plants have numerous layers of protection to ensure safety, the human operator is often the final arbiter, especially during abnormal situations. It is therefore not surprising that when operators lose control over the plant, undesirable consequences including property damage, injury, and sometimes loss of lives follow. It is therefore important to continuously monitor the plant operators' situation awareness based on their cognitive state. In this study, we make the first known attempt to infer the cognitive state of control room operators and its evolution over the course of carrying out tasks in a control room. First, we study the operator's actions to distinguish consistent actions from inconsistent ones that allows us to identify major events in the evolution of their cognitive state. Next, we conduct experimental studies with human participants and explore the evolution of their cognitive state through patterns in their eye tracking data. Our studies reveal that two eye tracking measures, fixation duration and saccade duration, are sensitive to the cognitive state and can be used to monitor control room operators and thus prevent human error.