Fault management in supervisory control: the effect of false alarms and support

Abstract

Automation has changed the role of human operators from direct manual control to supervision. Their main task is to monitor whether system performance remains within pre-specified ranges and intervention is only required in unusual situations. One of the consequences is a loss of situation awareness, which significantly affects performance in abnormal, time-critical situation. The present study reports two experiments, both dealing with fault management in a maritime supervisory control task. The first experiment investigated to what extent false alarms would affect performance and diagnosis behaviour when multiple disturbances occurred. Thirty-nine students from maritime curricula diagnosed disturbances that could either be real or turn out to be a false alarm. The presence of false alarms not only affected the rate with which the subsystems under control were sampled, but it also increased problem-solving time. One of the reasons for suboptimal performance in dealing with fault propagation was tunnel vision: participants had a tendency to deal with disturbances sequentially. In the second experiment the effect of support on performance and diagnosis behaviour was investigated. Two types of support were distinguished: interactive support requiring participants to provide the symptom values and automatic support that directly provided the correct action. Thirty students from maritime curricula diagnosed disturbances with the help of either the interactive or the noninteractive support tool. The results indicated that even though both support tools gave the same advice on how to act, more incorrect actions were taken in the non-interactive support condition. Even though no differences in performance were found after the tool had been removed, it was shown that participants who were used to interactive support used a more structured problem-solving strategy than participants used to the non-interactive support. Consequences for system design are discussed.

Time-related behaviour in multitasking situations

“…Thus, hypothesis 2 can be accepted. Based on the claim of Burns (2000) that people view informations that are directly relevant to the control task, it may be hypothesized that the higher performance of polychrons could also have been due to more frequent sampling of the two systems as indicated by Kerstholt and Passenier (2000). An alternative explanation is embedded in the negative relationship between the strategy measures and the performance measures.…”

“…Performance can also be affected with manipulations in process gain and by the presence of disturbances and/or visual sampling. For example Kerstholt and Passenier (2000) found those who sample sub-systems more frequently tend to perform well. All such process and control characteristics pose interesting questions with respect to timerelated behaviour: how does one's ability to manage time affect control performance if at all?…”

Error discounting in probabilistic category learning.

“…High false alarm rates for automated error detection systems result in people slowing their response to, or simply ignoring warnings about potential errors (Parasuraman & Riley, 1997). For example, in a task monitoring the navigation, speed, power and cargo systems of a ship, if the system sets off frequent false error alarms, participants eventually ignore these warnings signals (Kerstholt & Passenier, 2000). With frequent false alarms, participants made fewer attempts to gain information needed to asses the problem, and were slower to access this information when they did.…”

Differential Effects of Likelihood Alarm Technology and False-Alarm vs. Miss Prone Automation on Decision Making

“…(Citations needed-Bustamante's IJAAS article? )Furthermore, Kerstholt and Passenier (2000) found that FP systems tend to increase problem-solving time for human monitors in supervisory control settings. In a target recognition study Maltz and Shinar (2003) found that performance was harmed more by increased false alarms compared to misses.…”