Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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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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    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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    Dynamic assessment of control room operator's cognitive workload using Electroencephalography (EEG)
    (04-10-2020)
    Iqbal, Mohd Umair
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    In modern plants with high levels of automation, acquiring an adequate mental model of the process has become a challenge for operators. Studies indicate that sub-optimal decisions occur when there is a mismatch between the demands of the process and the human's capability. This mismatch leads to high cognitive workload in human operators, often a precursor for poor performance. Recently, researchers in various safety critical domains (aviation, driving, marine, NPP, etc.) have started to explore the use of physiological measurements from humans to understand their cognitive workload and its effect. In this work, we evaluate the potential of EEG to measure cognitive workload of human operators in chemical process control room. We propose a single dry electrode EEG based methodology for identifying the similarities and mismatch between the operators’ mental model of the process and the actual process behaviour during abnormal situations. Our results reveal that SƟ(ω), the power spectral density of theta (ɵ) waves (frequency range 4–7 Hz) in the EEG signal has the potential to identify such mismatches. Results indicate that SƟ(ω) is positively correlated with workload and hence can be used for assessing the cognitive workload of operators in process industries.
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    Publication
    Dhrushti-AI: A multi-screen multi-user eye-tracking system to understand the cognitive behavior of humans in process industries
    (01-01-2023)
    Shajahan, Thasnimol Valuthottiyil
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    Madbhavi, Rahul
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    Shahab, Mohammed Aatif
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    Operator performance is key to ensuring safety in process industries. Therefore, a comprehensive assessment of their performance is critical for smooth and efficient plant operation. Traditional performance assessments are not comprehensive as these ignore cognitive aspects of performance. On the other hand, while eye-tracking-based approaches do provide a cognitive assessment during operating training, their applicability in a real-time real setting is limited. Existing eye-tracking systems come with many constraints affecting users' mobility (restricted movement in all directions) in their environment. In addition, it is beyond the scope of current eye trackers to track multiple users working in an environment, such as in control rooms. Satisfying the above requirements makes these eye-trackers expensive. In this work, we demonstrate the capabilities of an in-house developed cost-effective eye-tracking system to track users' eye movement in an unconstrained environment while giving freedom of head movement. Human subject studies are conducted to compare operators' gaze patterns and the quality of data with that obtained using commercial eye trackers. The results generally agree with data quality obtained using commercial eye trackers. Hence, the performance of the developed eye-tracking system is comparable to existing commercial eye-trackers while overcoming their limitations, such as restricted user movement, single-user tracking, and high cost.
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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.