The strategies of expert and novice petrochemical control room operators were investigated using eyetracking as they monitored and corrected a crude refinement simulation. Plotted scan paths were used to investigate the differences in eye behavior of three expert control room operators and six novice students. The effects of expertise and interface type on participant eye movements were evaluated. Scan path analysis revealed that monitoring strategy and interface type influenced how quickly participants were able to detect changes on-screen, though monitoring strategy did not depend on expertise level. Overall, eyetracking successfully identified the effects of monitoring strategy and interface type on performance.

The petrochemical industry relies on control room operators to manage safety-critical processes through complex displays. The goal of the current paper is to evaluate displays used by petrochemical industry control room operators by measuring performance through speed and accuracy to distinguish between two displays. The two displays represented a "state-of-the-art" display and a poor display. Speed and accuracy were measured in regard to actions involved in alarm management of a simulated crude refining unit at three workload levels-easy, medium, and hard. Operators were significantly slower and less accurate on the poor interface than the good interface. Speed progressively got slower from easy to medium to hard workload levels. Speed and accuracy as indicators of performance were able to differentiate between two significantly different displays. These two metrics represent the initial stages of developing a set of tools the petrochemical industry can use to evaluate operator interface designs.

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