The Enemy Within

Lurking within our control rooms is a demon, who strikes at the worst possible time in the life of a control room. During the early hours of the morning driven by poor lighting, unhealthy environmental controls, fatigue takes its toll – with no fatigue countermeasures in place the operator faces the perfect storm.

Displays with poor design making it difficult to distinguish change because the salience is too high, alarms overwhelm operators, and due to poor configuration make it difficult to use them. The alarms had been rationalized but not documented, not prioritized correctly, and alarm set points incorrectly set.

The net result an Organizational Accident with large loss of life and catastrophic environmental effects, the perfect storm.

These major accidents keep happening, and we do not seem to be able to learn the lessons from them and implement practices that will mitigate them?

The major issue: many companies use multiple vendors to implement their alarm Systems, different ones to design and implement their HMI’s, and others to design and build their control rooms with no common philosophy or goals. So each does what they think is best and overall nothing works towards a common goal. What is that common goal? It is Situation Awareness, and more specifically, the control room operator’s ability to Detect, Diagnose, and Respond to an Abnormal Event.

The solution is a High Performance Control Room that integrates Alarm Management, HMI, and control desk ergonomics into a solution founded on Human Factors in design. Integrated with new technology in the form of SMART keyboards by Weytec providing seamless mouse movement across multiple workstation displays, Prysm Laser Phosphor Display (LPD) tiles, and LCDs have almost imperceptible touch latency and render high-resolution, realistic images that are sharp and bright — even in ambient light. And finally, speakers that keep the sound within the radius of a console.

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