A study on effectiveness of automation and interface presentation for coping with transients

One of the human´s roles in modern, complex technological systems is to deal with unanticipated situations not treated explicitly in the design. In order to assess the relative effectiveness of automation and interface presentation, an experiment has been conducted with a micro-world that has an automatic diagnostic tool for fault location without fault quantification. Combined with the micro-world are two kinds of interface presentation. One is a traditional P&ID graphical interface and the other an ecological interface that aims to make visible the ecology of work. A new icon has been designed for a heat exchanger, which is a fundamental piece of equipment in the thermodynamic process simulated here. Two types of fault, pipe break and leak in various locations of the process are simulated, and observations of the subjects´ responses have been made for each interface which is treated as a between-subject factor. Our experimental results show no difference between the two interfaces for pipe break transient, while the ecological interface gives better performance for some pipe leaks. Investigations from cognitive work analysis have been made to make dear this somewhat “unpredicted” result