Improving control room state awareness through complex sonification interfaces

Abstract

Across a number of complex control room settings, there are concerns regarding operator information overload and alarm flooding. The evolution of control room technological capabilities has accelerated in recent years, due to drastic improvements in computer processing power, speed, and sensor integration. However, aging infrastructure and retiring senior operators in legacy control room systems such as chemical and power generation plants have begun to create opportunities for once-per-generation improvements in control room interface capabilities. Additional facilities, including power grid interconnection centers and computer network security monitoring centers, have created new generations of network operations control centers (NOCs). The authors' work is emphasizing the development and application of audification and parameter mapping techniques to generate engineering-based principles for presenting state-based auditory information to plant or NOC operators. There are no current systematic engineering-based principles used to apply sonification to control rooms or engineering system states in a clearly standardized way. Our current work in this domain examines the critical parameters that control room operators recognize and monitor in order to get a "sense of the plant" in nominal, degrading, or hazardous states. Principles and parameters for implementing these sonification techniques for power plant and NOC contexts are presented and discussed. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.