A Generalized User Interface Concept

Abstract

Many technical work environments nowadays face the situation that large technical systems are controlled by semi-autonomous software systems that process a huge amount of information. Human operators are still required to monitor the system, but only at sporadic time points to assure that the system is healthy or to analyze any fault conditions that have occurred since the last observation. However, a problem with such a monitoring situation is that the operator is often out-of-the loop when observing the system (after a long time of not observing it). The objective is to develop a graphical user interface concept that supports operators in developing valid situation awareness of the system and furthermore provides an easy to use functionality for efficient retrospective system analysis. We discuss requirements for retrospective system analysis and present a concept for a user interface (UI) that efficiently supports the operator in getting back in the loop and developing a valid situation awareness of the current system state. It furthermore supports the operator in recognizing the global system health state, identifying and localizing current and past fault conditions and easily tracing how the system and especially error states have evolved over time. The UI concept is applied to a software application for controlling and monitoring hybrid energy systems. However, we argue, that the UI concept is applicable for a wide range of applications.