Heuristic and bias information on ship engine operation alarm display

Abstract

The fast and correct decision-making from an operator in the ship engine operation is needed. Specifically in an emergency situation, when numbers of alarms occur at the same time. This research aims to study the effect of adding information attribute into the alarm display to the behavior of the operator on their decision-making process. Either make improvement or bias is studied on behalf of the effect. Several students (N = 17) belong to Marine Engineering Department have participated. The experiment divided into three sessions with different amount of information. The participant should arrange the priority of the alarm that occurred using drag and drop feature on an HTML page. After each session, participants fill Likert-type scale of confidence level. From the statistical calculation, participants confidence level was difference each session (p < 0.05, χ(2,17) = 16.32). The participants also tend to change their priority of alarms between session (p < 0.05) and support the correlation (r = 0.51) between high confidence level with the tendency to follow the quantitative information in ordinally. The time on task of participants solving each session was shorter between session (p < 0.05, f(2,28) = 5.37). We conclude that adding more information into alarm display was increasing the confidence, but the decision- making tends to be biased.