Experimental study on the effects of visualized functionally abstracted information on process control tasks

Two distinct design problems of information display for process control are information content representation and visual form design. Regarding information content, we experimentally showed the effectiveness of functionally abstracted information without the benefits of sophisticated graphical presentation in various task situations. However, since it is obvious that the effects of the information display are also influenced by display formats (i.e., visual forms) as well as the information content, further research was required to investigate the effectiveness of visualized functionally abstracted information. For this purpose, this study conducted an experiment in complex process control tasks (operation and fault diagnosis). The experimental purposes were to confirm the effectiveness of the functionally abstracted information visualized with emergent features or peculiar geometric forms and to examine the additional effects of the visualization on task performance. The results showed that functionally abstracted information presented with sophisticated visual forms helped operators perform process control tasks in more efficient and safe way. The results also indicated the importance of explicit visualization of goal–means relation between higher and lower abstraction levels. Lastly, this study proposed a framework for designing visual forms for process control display.