Home // CENTRIC 2011, The Fourth International Conference on Advances in Human-oriented and Personalized Mechanisms, Technologies, and Services // View article

A Personalization Approach Based on Models Integration for a User Interface for Supervision in a Power Plant

Authors:
Victor Alvarez-Cortes
Benjamín Eddie Zayas Pérez
Víctor Hugo Zárate Silva
Jorge Adolfo Ramírez Uresti

Keywords: personalization; user interface; user modeling; adaptive interaction; user interface evaluation

Abstract:
In the operation of a power plant, the operator has to deal with a number of variables displayed in several windows, presented in different formats such as tabular, one-line diagrams, process diagrams, etc. Under these conditions, the operator needs to locate data relevant to the current status of the plant and efficiently navigate a large number of screens within the user interface. This situation becomes critical for infrequent tasks within the plant such as the start-up, shut-down or for abnormal operational conditions. In order to deal with the above situations, we propose a personalization mechanism based on models for adapting contents in a user interfaces for the operation of power plants. The model takes advantage of the integration of specific sub-models from artificial intelligence, user modeling and human-computer interaction. A personalization approach is applied into an adaptive user interface prototype that is expected to improve the user-system interaction by reducing the time to complete the startup of a power plant. For this purpose, contextual information of the power plant, user interaction logs, user’s preferences and experience are considered. At this first stage, our prototype was evaluated in a simulated scenario with non power plant operators to investigate improvements of task performance for carrying out the procedure of the startup of a power plant process and to identify usability issues. Results from this initial evaluation show consistent time reductions and correct predictions of futures displayed variables for the adaptive user interface version despite the fact that participants in this evaluation had a lack of the domain knowledge. This results needs to be validated with further studies involving power plant operators, in order to compare the impact the domain knowledge plays in the time reductions.

Pages: 78 to 84

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: October 23, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3492

ISBN: 978-1-61208-167-0

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from October 23, 2011 to October 29, 2011