Tablet-Based Functionalities to Support Control Room Operators When Process Information Becomes Unreliable or After Control Room Abandonment

In some emergency situations, control room indications may become lost or unreliable, or the operators may have to abandon the control room. Although operators in such situations will have the ability to safely shut down the plant, they may lack the information for broader diagnosis and understanding of what has happened. A study has been performed to test what kind of portable supporting functionalities would be useful for operators to have when information in the control room is incomplete, or when they have to abandon the control room. The results showed that access to functions with historic process information could be helpful in diagnosing the situation, in particular for seeing details that may have been overlooked. A dynamic overview display with historic information was rated as the most useful function.