Decision Support in Supervisory Control of High-Risk Industrial Systems

It is argued that the supervisory control of complex industrial processes having a potential for serious consequences in case of accidents requires careful consideration of the allocation of decision making between the three main agents of control; namely the designer, the operator and the automatic control system.

In particular, it is advocated that, instead of continuing their efforts to make their preplanning of responses and countermeasures more and more complete and thus restrict the operators' own initiative, designers should take advantage of modern information technology to make available to the operators their conceptual models and their processing resources so as to allow the operators to function as their extended arm in coping with the plant.

Such as interactive decision-making activity would thus benefit from this simultaneous availability of the design basis, up-to-date knowledge of plant status and accumulated operational experience.