Evaluating the role of intelligent support in user interfaces to supervisory control systems

User interfaces to supervisory control systems are becoming unmanageably complex; operators are spending significant time and cognitive effort in managing the interface which impedes the tasks of managing the control system. We present a user interface technique for supervisory control systems which uses adaptive presentation to provide context-sensitive interface configuration with the goal of reducing this overhead. An evaluation was carried out to determine if and when this intelligent assistance is useful in typical supervisory control situations. We describe the methodology, discuss problems to resolve in future studies and present preliminary results