Qualitative user aiding for alarm management (QUALM): an integrated demonstration of emerging technologies for aiding process control operators

Managing abnormal situations in industrial processes has become increasingly challenging due to the increased sophistication of both the process as well as the automated control system. Operators can benefit significantly from tools that assist in abnormal situation management. Some critical technologies that can help operators include: user intent recognition, diagnosis and advanced graphical user interface. While each of these technologies independently have been proven to be valuable, enhanced benefits can be reaped by integrating all these into a single framework. In this work, we describe a framework for integrating these technologies to provide the operator with a single system. A real-time simulation of a unit in a chemical plant is used to test the value of the integrated framework. This effort has helped us identify functional requirements of the various modules and the mechanism in which they interact