Potential benefits of eye tracking within process control monitoring tasks

Statistically, about 70% of the process industry accidents in the refinery control room are caused by human error. It is necessary to develop a deeper understanding of the interaction between humans and the automated systems. This experiment investigated the effectiveness of Overview Displays in a refinery control room by using eye-tracking measures. Specifically, control room operators were presented with three Overview Displays that have been adopted by the oil and gas industry under two levels of difficulty for each display. The dependent variables include five eye-movement metrics that previous studies have related to cognitive processing. The results indicated that Overview Display type significantly affected eye-movement behavior. The consistency between eye tracking results and the performance results suggesting the possibility that eye-tracking measures could be used to indicate the performance results. The findings could be used to increase operator assessment effectiveness.