Human-Factors-Driven Intelligent Alarm Management

Electric utilities are struggling with rapidly increasing amounts of data and alarms due to new technologies being introduced into the electric grid. For power grid operations, alarming is a critical function by which system operators identify events on the power system that need their attention. Assessing the credibility of each source, comprehending their implications, understanding the inter-relationships among different sources, and seeking supporting evidence in a timely manner present a significant cognitive challenge to the human operator who is stressed to analyze these relationships and/or draw on relevant past experience. The goals of the research and work conducted in Phase I of this proposal is to use cognitive and human factors research methods to define a roadmap to address one of the major, growing needs of real-time management of the electric grid: an effective alarm management system that provides decision support tools that adequately reflect the decisions and judgments of experts, and enables control room operators to work in an environment that enables greater continuous situational awareness. The research findings and conclusions of Phase I will be leveraged in the Phase II design and development of an alarm management system and will be leveraged for training, facilitating operators to build a mental model and experiences of tools they will use while engaged in their real-time work. To ensure that the design of an integrated alarm management system supports the goals, decision-making, and work of real-time operators, activities that will take place during the Phase I research include interviewing system operators and operations engineers, running simulated exercises that produce cascading alarm situations, such as severe storms, cyber/physical interdictions with operators, measuring operator levels of stress and situational awareness, and developing initial prototype visualization/workflow alarming interfaces to test with operators. Control room operators, empowered with a real-time, human factors-derived integrated alarm management system, are anticipated to have significantly higher levels of situational awareness, stronger mental models around the systems' function, and be able to make effective decisions faster and at lower levels of fatigue. These factors also are anticipated to improve system resiliency, as those operators' stronger mental models will assist them in recovery/avoidance activities, provide better collaboration even through existing means like telephone calls, and allow operators to do their work more easily. Taken together, these improvements are anticipated to reduce the widespread outages affecting many homes and businesses that often contain the words in the root cause analysis, "loss of situational awareness". Given society's strong dependence on reliable and resilient electric power, and the significant financial and temporal implications of an outage, the reduction of human error, improved system recovery time, and ability to more rapidly and effectively onboard new personnel, this effort is anticipated to have significant public benefits.