Identifier

etd-04292010-235934

Degree

Master of Science in Industrial Engineering (MSIE)

Department

Construction Management

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

The liquid and gas pipeline community has recently been faced with the challenge of new governmental regulations set forth by congress which are being implemented by PHMSA (an arm of the DOT). These new governmental regulations need to understand the role of the human in the loop as part of alarm management systems. To investigate alarm rate standards a repeated measures design was developed that included a series of ten (10) simulated liquid pipeline operator scenarios utilizing high fidelity liquid pipeline simulation software (Stoner Pipeline Simulator). A total of 39 participants volunteered for this study. Participants completed two subsets of experiments, five were completed using an alarm display presenting alarms by time (chronological) and the remaining five experiments were completed using a categorical alarm display. Statistically significant differences were found to exist in participant response time, acknowledgement time, and accuracy of response given different alarm display types and alarm rates. Use of the categorical alarm display resulted in significantly reduced alarm acknowledgement and response times. Also, a severe operator performance reduction with regard to alarm handling was observed when the alarm rate was increased from ten alarms per ten minutes (10-alarms/10-minutes) to twenty alarms per ten minutes (20-alarms/10-minutes).

Date

2010

Document Availability at the Time of Submission

Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide.

Committee Chair

Harvey, Craig M.

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_theses.4148

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