Monitoring activity

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As monitoring activities in general management and control is automated processes running through a man understood.

Functions of a monitoring activity

Qualitatively, the task of an operator can be described as a higher-level control process. The state of a process or a system must be observed, the actual state must be compared with a target state and, if necessary, the correction of a deviation must be planned and carried out. There are five main functions:

  • Planning of the tasks to be performed and the type of task execution by the operator,
  • Implementing the planning,
  • Monitoring the process and, if necessary, recognizing errors and determining their cause
  • Interventions in the event of faults in order to cancel automatic processes and, depending on the situation, to implement new target states or new procedures as well
  • Systematize empirical knowledge about system behavior in order to be able to pass it on to new operators.

Occurrence of surveillance activities

Typical for monitoring activities are the control rooms of large plants such as power plants , blast furnaces , steel works and chemical plants . But you can also find yourself in the quality control of production, air traffic control or with the anesthetist in the hospital. Mainly cognitive resources are used. In addition to continuously evaluating the current status, the surgeon must also constantly anticipate possible developments, foresee system behavior and come up with suitable strategies for dealing with possible incidents.

Quirks

There are two extremes in the surgeon's workload.

If the process is in the normal range, the high degree of automation leads to passive monitoring and thus cognitive underload. The vigilance required for the workplace already drops after 10–20 minutes - depending on the surgeon's disposition. The course of the decrease in vigilance depends on factors such as age, neuroticism and extraversion .

In the event of an incident or even a malfunction, however , the surgeon is exposed to high levels of stress and even personal life risk. In a very short time, large amounts of accumulated information have to be selected, consistently evaluated and corrective measures initiated. There is a great risk that the stressful situation will restrict information intake and that the surgeon will react with rule-based, knowledge-based measures rather than current information.

Design implications

The basic prerequisite for the design of a monitoring activity is that the surgeon actually has all the necessary information and intervention options available. In the case of measuring stations that are found even more frequently, where it is necessary to determine individual measured values ​​on site and to intervene directly on the equipment, one speaks of moving monitoring .

Furthermore, the capabilities of human perception and information processing as well as the anthropometric aspects must be taken into account in the design and limit values ​​must be observed. ISO 11064-1 helps with this . In addition, due consideration must be given to the psychological stress involved in processing information. The following rules are essential for ergonomic design:

  • The information must be presented in such a way that the human diagnosis and condition assessment process is supported. The necessary memory skills must be reduced by the structure and the perception of contexts made easier.
  • By preprocessing the information and deriving summarized state variables, the surgeon's processing processes can be expediently accelerated.
  • Laws of visual perception, such as colors, arrangement, size, etc. must be taken into account.
  • Alarms should be implemented in an urgency hierarchy.

For the implementation, integrated advertisements that enable the so-called “ecological interface design (EID)” are preferred. In view of the high proportion of passivity in work, intensive, recurring training and simulations of disruptions are particularly important.

literature

  • DIN EN ISO 10075 (Part 1–3): Ergonomic basics of mental workload
  • ISO 11064 (parts 1–7): Ergonomic design of control centers

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Schmidt, Ludger: Monitoring activity . In: Landau, Kurt (Hrsg.): Lexicon of work design: Best practice in the work process. Stuttgart: Genter, 2007. - ISBN 978-3-87247-655-5 . P. 1250/51
  2. ↑ Sheridan, Thomas B .: Humans and Automation: System Design and Research Issues Santa Monica / Cal: Wiley, 2002. - ISBN 047123428-1
  3. ↑ Here is an example: In a chemical company in which exothermic processes take place, there are occasional short-term fluctuations in the power supply. These are designed in such a way that humans do not perceive them - for example when the lighting is flickering. However, they cause the controller to drop out , which then restarts from sleep. For the surgeons, the incident manifests itself in a sudden occurrence of an almost incalculable number of alarms, which are signaled on screens, run via a logging printer, etc. Critical values ​​such as the rise in pressure and temperature in the system are also signaled acoustically. Only after a few minutes, when the system operators have clarified that all pumps are at a standstill and all valves are in the idle position and that the processes in the system continue to run unregulated, are they able to determine that this is due to a power failure and that this is logical to react. You have almost a quarter of an hour to restart the plant, after which the safety measures with serious economic consequences take effect. A device that monitors the flow of electricity and also the operating status of the key devices can provide the power failure diagnosis as the first of all the alarms that arise and thus save several valuable minutes.