Building causal models for operator aiding in a supervisory control environment

Operators of large industrial processes often need to make decisions based on their assessment of the process state and behavior. Advances in computer technology have made possible the design of knowledge-based systems to aid the operator in coping with complex situations that arise from changing process states. One approach to these aiding systems is to model the causalities inherent in a process to produce high-level diagnosis and description of process behavior. In this paper, we discuss various methods of process modeling and also present a specific method that we developed, the signed device model (SDM). We believe that SDM exhibits characteristics for intelligent operator aiding