Effect of usage of visualized eye fixation points of skilled operators on education of plant operation

It is very important to success the skill of plant operations because veteran operators are retiring in Japanese chemical industries and young operators have little experiences to take counter measures for plant troubles because of the increase of the reliability of plant components. This study aims at investigating effective education method to success the operation skill of veteran plant operators. Because recent plant operation is made through control panels, this study investigates experimentally the effect of usage of visualized eye fixation points of skilled operators by using an artificial plant called DURESS. A visualization method of eye fixation frequency on control panel by a kernel density function is proposed. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed visualization method for the rapid learning of DURESS operation. The experimental results for operation tasks with component anomalies suggest the effectiveness of the proposed visualization method to acquire operation ability for an inexperienced operation task.