DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF HUMAN-SYSTEM INTERFACES FOR INDUSTRIAL PLANTS

The Human-System Interfaces (HSIs) are important parts of an industrial plant in which the operator interact to carry through its functions and tasks. The HSIs manly include alarms, displays of information and controls. The development and evaluation of HSIs for control rooms is one of research area at the Human-System Interface Laboratory (LABIHS). This article shows briefly the state of art of the human-system interfaces, with emphasis in the three main interface construction methodologies: the task-oriented human interface, the ecological human interface, and the function-oriented human interface. The article also gives a brief description of the LABIHS infrastructure, with emphasis in the tools for construction and testing new interfaces. As a starting point for future developing, a new overview screen for the LABIHS simulator based in the function-oriented methodology was developed. The new overview screen was evaluated in the LABIHS NPP simulator using the E-0 procedure of the plant emergency operation procedures (EOPs). The results showed substantial improvement in the new overview screen compared to the previous one. 1