A safety-critical decision support system evaluation using situation awareness and workload measures

Mohsen Naderpour, Jie Lu and Guangquan Zhang

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2016, vol. 150, issue C, 147-159

Abstract: To ensure the safety of operations in safety-critical systems, it is necessary to maintain operators׳ situation awareness (SA) at a high level. A situation awareness support system (SASS) has therefore been developed to handle uncertain situations [1]. This paper aims to systematically evaluate the enhancement of SA in SASS by applying a multi-perspective approach. The approach consists of two SA metrics, SAGAT and SART, and one workload metric, NASA-TLX. The first two metrics are used for the direct objective and subjective measurement of SA, while the third is used to estimate operator workload. The approach is applied in a safety-critical environment called residue treater, located at a chemical plant in which a poor human-system interface reduced the operator׳s SA and caused one of the worst accidents in US history. A counterbalanced within-subjects experiment is performed using a virtual environment interface with and without the support of SASS. The results indicate that SASS improves operators׳ SA, and specifically has benefits for SA levels 2 and 3. In addition, it is concluded that SASS reduces operator workload, although further investigations in different environments with a larger number of participants have been suggested.

Keywords: Situation awareness; Situation awareness measurement; System evaluation; Decision support systems; Safety-critical systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:150:y:2016:i:c:p:147-159

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2016.01.024

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