Plantcom – Switched Communication Between Field and Control Room
Project information
Project duration: 07/2016-06/2019
Project manager: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Leon Urbas
Fincancing : Wissenschaftsrat/DFG
Project partners: TU Dresden - Professur für Ingenieurpsychologie und angewandte Kognitionsforschung, TU Dresden - Professur für Prozessleittechnik
Project description
The error diagnosis in the process and manufacturing industry is a highly complex, cooperative task. During normal operation, the almost complete automation ensures a high level of structuring, whereas the necessary solution steps can differ during a failure case. Due to this, it is almost impossible to fall back on well-trained workflows and rules. Instead, the operators have to manage challenging, complex problems: The status of the plant is mostly non-transparent and is defined by a variety of interacting variables. The whole system has a high level of self-dynamic so that condition of the plant will change continuously and nonlinear even without the intervention of the operator. During the diagnoses and the troubleshooting, several partly conflicting goals must be coordinated and rated. The feedback of the interventional effects often occurs delayed and it may appear remote and side effects.
Such a cooperative problem solving process requires a high degree of coordination in order to be able to create a common representation of the situation. The partners must check and review the mutual understanding continuously to build up and maintain a common ground. The required communication is time consuming and prone to error.
A special feature of the mediated interaction between control room and field is the different and partly complementary information spaces. Both have information to which the other partner has no access and both are missing information which is necessary for a successful solution. This makes the mediated communication prone to errors. It is assumed, that the cooperative problem solving process will be improved by adding visual material. Here, a part of the action and information space will be transferred to the other partner. The goals of the projects are (1) to determine how such a transfer shall be organized and designed, (2) to develop prototypical solutions and (3) to check their effects on the team performance, communication and TSA empirically.