Lessons Learnt From Human-In-Loop Experimental Scenarios For Advanced Automation In Process Safety

Operators in process control rooms play an essential role in monitoring and controlling the processes of safety-critical plants, such as chemical plants, power plants, and oil refineries. These operators must be able to interact effectively with the systems to ensure safe operations. However, organisational, technical, and personal factors are essential in operators' ability to ensure plant stability. This paper builds upon the outcomes and observations of an experimental study to address the critical evaluation gap in human system interfaces (HSIs), which serve as decision-support tools within control room environments. The study compared three different setups of human system interfaces in four human-in-the-loop (HITL) configurations, incorporating two alarm design formats (Prioritised vs non-prioritised) and three procedural guidance setups (e.g. one presenting paper procedures, one offering digitised screen-based procedures, and lastly an AI-based procedural guidance system). In this follow-up work, the authors present the lessons learned from the experiment, emphasising the aspects that lead to a deeper understanding of the dynamic interactions between the human operator and the features of the Human Machine Interface (HMI), also considering the criticality of the situation, the time available and the support provided for decision making and response actions. This paper aims to provide actionable knowledge related to design features for supporting decision-making in process control rooms, considering the possibilities also offered by enhanced data analysis and AI tools.