Ensuring usability of future smart energy control room systems

Abstract

Energy providers face several technical and societal challenges with respect to renewable energies and smart energy systems. As central management units of energy supply systems, control rooms and their operators are especially affected by those changes. While reliability and safety of software systems for managing electric power grids is of utmost importance, their usability has to be ensured as well in order to allow for safe and efficient operations. Previous work has failed to address issues of work reengineering and user interface design for future smart energy control rooms due to insufficient collaboration of human-computer interaction researchers, energy informatics researchers and energy sector stakeholders. This paper describes challenges and approaches for ensuring usability of future smart energy control room systems. It is based on a human-centered design process within an interdisciplinary research project bringing together the aforementioned groups of experts. Results were derived from systematic literature review, workshops and surveys with control room operators as well as contextual inquiries in three control rooms. They concern both the process of realising software systems for managing electric power grids and applications characteristics with respect to user interface design. It is concluded that open and modular software systems require consistent user interfaces based on a style guide. Furthermore, software and usability engineering processes of energy control systems have to be aligned in order to ensure usability, safety and security.

Exploring the energy informatics and energy citizenship domains: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Energy Management is an umbrella theme in the domain of EI encompassing the energy supply side as well as consumption side aspects of energy distribution and consumption, where energy informatics can play a critical role in meeting the goals such as reducing energy cost, energy consumption, energy loss, and increasing pro t. Literature classi ed under this theme discusses the application of EI to meet some of the above-de ned goals. For example, in [53] application of usability principles in energy control systems used in day-to-day energy management activity, is discussed which is critical for the safe and e cient functioning of energy systems. A signi cant focus is given to the human-centered design process to obtain cohesiveness between EI software and the usability engineering process for usability, safety, and security.…”

Untersuchung von Aufmerksamkeitseffekten für die gezielte Gestaltung von Visualisierungsoberflächen für zeitgemäße Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion

“…Eine angemessene Gestaltung der Bedienoberfläche und der dortigen Informationsdarstellungen bilden die Grundlage für angemessene Bedienhandlungen und die Vermeidung von Fehlern (Hoppe et al 2019;Stanton et al 2009). Dabei sollten die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Menschen hinsichtlich seiner kognitiven Kapazitäten von vornherein in den Gestaltungsprozess einfließen und somit ein Ansatz des "Human Centered Design" vorherrschen (Mentler et al 2018). Auch aus neueren Theorien der Embedded Embodied Cognition (Dawson 2014, S. 59 ff.…”