Improving the design of interfaces for post-operational assessment and diagnostic systems for turbine equipment

The possibilities for improving turbine equipment diagnostic systems by enhancing the ergonomics of their interfaces through the decomposition of business processes and their subsequent comparison with interaction scenarios implemented in the system are considered. The design and development of a modern turbine equipment diagnostic system is a complex task at the intersection of information technology and thermal power engineering. The effective operation of such a system can help an enterprise save a significant amount of financial and time resources by automating complex calculations, organizing information, and reducing the number of routine operations. On the other hand, failures in the diagnostic system create risks that can lead to significant losses. As a rule, when developing such systems, great attention is paid to data quality and the reliability of calculation algorithms. However, the reliability and effectiveness of the diagnostic process depend not only on the performance of algorithms and devices, but also on the actions of the system user — the operator performing the diagnostics. If the diagnostic system interface does not take into account the peculiarities of human perception of information, the user of such system will not be able to perform diagnostics correctly, or at least will encounter significant difficulties. Despite this, the issue of user-friendly interfaces is not covered in great detail in professional literature. The proposed approach to interface design will allow for a systematic analysis of their usability in the context of production tasks. In order to test the described approach, an analysis of the usability of the UrFU diagnostic system “Equipment Status Control” was performed, with ways to optimize human-machine interaction identified, and interface adjustments proposed.

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