Analyzing Procedure Performance using Abstraction Hierarchy: Implications of Designing Procedures for High-risk Process Operations

PresentationStandard operating procedures (SOPs) are a vital element of everyday operations in chemical process industries. Incident investigations also indicate that a majority of adverse events in the processing operations are ascribed to issues associated with SOPs. Although there have been continuous efforts to improve informational and perceptual aspects of SOPs, assessing them from a systems perspective remains a persistent gap. As one novel way to address such gap, this study employs an ecological approach to understand the functional structure of the work domain, that is, abstraction hierarchy (AH) and its relations to SOPs and operator performance. First, this study models a 3-phase separation system, a common gas-oil-water separation process, using an abstraction-decomposition space as a work domain of the system. Second, we assess the AH level, one dimension of the abstraction-decomposition space, of the SOPs developed for three tasks in the 3-phase separation system. In order to consider operators’ knowledge about the tasks, experience-task familiarity (E-TF) level is also assessed as a combinatory factor. To this end, a two-way analysis of variance is conducted to find out the effect of E-TF level (high vs. low) and AH level of the SOPs (physical vs. functional) on the operator’s performance. Results show significant main effects of the E-TF level and AH level on the successful performance of the SOPs. The interaction effect of the two variables is considered marginally significant. Based on the results, several implications for the design of SOPs in relation to the AH of the chemical processing domain are discussed

Modelling work domain knowledge with the combined use of abstraction hierarchy and living systems theory

This study is aimed at developing a new method for modelling work domain knowledge with the combined use of abstraction hierarchy (AH) and living systems theory (LST). AH has been widely used as a work domain knowledge representation framework in the field of cognitive systems engineering and human–computer interaction, and its usefulness has been proved in a range of work domains. However, its effective use still remains a challenging issue. In order to address this problem, this study firstly points out several issues that can be raised in the use of AH and then explains why and how LST can give concepts and principles helpful to resolve them. The proposed method offers a framework for how to combine AH and LST, particularly to identify functional knowledge at higher abstraction levels. It also offers a process for modelling the knowledge of a work domain based on the combined use of AH and LST. The use of the proposed method is exemplified by modelling the knowledge of a simplified secondary cooling system of nuclear power plants. The proposed method is a new approach to refining the concepts of AH and modelling the knowledge of a work domain that humans should interact. It is believed that it will be a useful tool for knowledge modellers in identifying and modelling the knowledge of a work domain in terms of its functional structure. However, it should be noted that its usefulness can be limited to technology-oriented engineering systems; it would not be easily applied to human activity-oriented systems

IMPROVED ROBOTIC DEVICE DRIVE SYSTEM- FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEM (FMS)

With today's industry and new technology development, there are more demands on efficient and flexible system in the manufacturing system in order to have a productive and qualitative production. Plus, robotic and automation is the main element in the industry especially for the manufacturing factories. The innovation of flexible manufacturing system has been developed rapidly in the industry as the market become more intense and competitive. This report presents the improved robotic device drive system-flexible manufacturing system (FMS). Fundamentally, this project is an improvement of the previous project. The existing system is an integrated system of KUKA KR3 Robotic, OMRON C200HE PLC, sensors, and conveyors. The improvement is focused on the two main parts which are PLC programming and human machine interface of the system. The system developed is an application of robotic and PLC in the real manufacturing industry which is a pick-and-place system. It is a small scale FMS where the robotic arm will respond to the PLC command which has been programmed. By using the application of HMI, the user could control and monitor the pick-and-place system from PC. In order to understand and develop this project a thorough study of the robotic, PLC, FMS, and HMI as well as the hardware and software has been done. Then, the development of programming for PLC and HMI had been developed by using CX-programmer and Visual Basic 6.0 software

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

IMPROVED ROBOTIC DEVICE DRIVE SYSTEM- FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEM (FMS)

With today's industry and new technology development, there are more demands on efficient and flexible system in the manufacturing system in order to have a productive and qualitative production. Plus, robotic and automation is the main element in the industry especially for the manufacturing factories. The innovation of flexible manufacturing system has been developed rapidly in the industry as the market become more intense and competitive. This report presents the improved robotic device drive system-flexible manufacturing system (FMS). Fundamentally, this project is an improvement of the previous project. The existing system is an integrated system of KUKA KR3 Robotic, OMRON C200HE PLC, sensors, and conveyors. The improvement is focused on the two main parts which are PLC programming and human machine interface of the system. The system developed is an application of robotic and PLC in the real manufacturing industry which is a pick-and-place system. It is a small scale FMS where the robotic arm will respond to the PLC command which has been programmed. By using the application of HMI, the user could control and monitor the pick-and-place system from PC. In order to understand and develop this project a thorough study of the robotic, PLC, FMS, and HMI as well as the hardware and software has been done. Then, the development of programming for PLC and HMI had been developed by using CX-programmer and Visual Basic 6.0 software

Cognitive Foundations for Visual Analytics

In this report, we provide an overview of scientific/technical literature on information visualization and VA. Topics discussed include an update and overview of the extensive literature search conducted for this study, the nature and purpose of the field, major research thrusts, and scientific foundations. We review methodologies for evaluating and measuring the impact of VA technologies as well as taxonomies that have been proposed for various purposes to support the VA community. A cognitive science perspective underlies each of these discussions