The Tennessee Eastman process (TEP) is a typical industrial process that consists of five main process units: a two-phase reactor, a separator, a stripper, a compressor, and a mixer.
Build the mockup of an interactive dashboard destined to the operators of the Separator machinery in the TEP plant. The dashboard should help operators monitor the status of the plant with high accuracy, and prevent potentially dangerous malfunctions.
Situational awareness in Human factors:
"Developing and maintaining a dynamic awareness of the situation and the risks present in an activity, based on gathering information from multiple sources from the task environment, understanding what the information means and using it to think ahead about what may happen next."
Oversight of all important variables for the control of the separator, centralized in one page.
Metrics grouped to align to the operator's mental model.
The dashboard supports the operator in his interpretation by providing him with multiple markers: temporal trends, intervals of acceptable values and coded alerts.
Color-coded alerts help detect abnormal situations (e.g. pressure chart).
Dotted sections of trendlines and histograms provide a view of the next two hours that allows the operator to anticipate if a value is at risk of causing an abnormal situation.
Cognitive workload in Human factors:
"The amount of effort people have to exert mentally to use the interface"
The visual comparison between variables under a common block, but also between variables that have a causal relationship, avoids having to search for information.
The salience of the orange alarms allows a problem to be spotted quickly, eliminating the burden of having to constantly scan the results.
Temporal and predictive trends eliminate the need to always reassess the situation in the moment, which increases performance.
The operator can dwell on the overview by identifying the normality of the indicators, or pay more attention to a part of the process in particular.
Graphs are always accompanied by instantaneous values, to avoid having to look for an axis coordinate. Acceptable ranges are also always located with current value pointers, which eliminates the need to calculate deviations.
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