Plant Operator Model for Human Interface Evaluation

A simulation environment of plant operation, which consists of an operator model, a human-machine interface (HMI) model and a plant model was developd. When the operator model recognizes an abnormal situation, the model generates a countermeasure program in its short-term memory based on both the plant state information acquired from the plant model through the HMI model and the knowledge bases installed into the operator model. A comparison between the operator model's behavior and the human operator's behavior under the same malfunction was used to extract the characteristics of the human operator and to obtain information on human errors.