Estimation of a plant operator´s cognitive state

Recently, plant systems have remarkably improved and their operation has become difficult, whereas there is a shortage of expert operators in Japan. Plant operation supporting systems are required to cope with that situation. Until now such systems did not consider the operator´s cognitive state, so that they might bring about human errors. This paper suggests that the plant operation supporting system should estimate the operator´s cognitive state, and describes a model to estimate the operator´s cognitive states, including an inner translation model and rules to stimulate the model depending on plant process indicators. These models are represented by a fuzzy modeling method. The estimation reasoning is calculated by the Dempster´s combination method to integrate matching rules. An Individual model is built experimentally, and usefulness of the presented method is verified