Ecological Interface Design and Fault Management Performance: Long-Term Effects

Abstract

This paper presents a six-month longitudinal study of the effects of ecological interface design (EID) on fault management performance. The research was conducted in the context of DURESS II, a real-time, interactive thermal-hydraulic process control simulation that was designed to be representative of industrial systems. Subjects' performance on two interfaces was compared, one based on the principles of EID and another based on a more traditional piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID) format. Subjects were required to perform several control tasks, including startup, tuning, shutdown, and fault management on both routine and non-routine faults. At the end of the experiment, subjects used the interface that the other group had been using to control the system. The results indicate that there are substantial individual differences in performance, but that overall, the EID interface led to faster fault detection, more accurate fault diagnosis, and faster fault compensation.