Design Issues and Knowledge Representations for Modern Control Room Interfaces

Abstract

With the advanced technological possibilities for man-machine interfaces in control rooms of complex dynamic systems, a new quality of questions and problems for their design need to be addressed and investigated. Expert system advances to support the designer of control room interfaces, and later, the control room operator, play a crucial role in the ongoing discussion within the cognitive engineering community, and most of all between all organizational groups involved in the process of system design.In this paper, general design issues for modern man-machine interfaces are discussed in relation to problem solving and engineering tasks. A knowledge representation for a new graphical interface design is described that accounts for cognitive and ergonomic factors, that guarantees for higher consistency and improved ease of the design process, and that can be applied both during the design phase and the operation phase of a control system by a set of expert systems. In conjunction with data and knowledge structures for the application of expert systems to the design phase, and later, the operation phase of real-time systems, some of the requirements for the reasoning techniques are discussed. Finally, the question of applicable knowledge acquisition methods to provide proper contents for the suggested representations is addressed.