[SystemSafety] power plant user interfaces

Mon Jul 13 09:39:08 CEST 2015

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On 2015-07-13 07:30 , Gergely Buday wrote:
>> [PBL] You don't say what you have in mind with TMI.
> 
> Stone, Jarrett, Woodroffe and Minocha's book User Interface Design and Evaluation writes:

There is a huge amount of writing on TMI. Chick Perrow wrote that "It is probably the most
well-documented examination of organisational performance in the public record. At last count I
found ten published technical volumes or books on the accident alone, perhaps one hundred
articles, and many volumes of testimony." And that was 31 years ago!

I don't necessarily buy Stone et al.'s comment that

> The root of the problem, therefore, seemed to be that the control panels did not support the
> task of serious error and incident recovery.

Perrow's suggestion would rather be that the system is tightly-coupled and interactively-complex
and is therefore susceptible to normal accidents (that is a technical term for Perrow). Fixing one
bit doesn't change its nature as tightly-coupled and interactively-complex, so will not reduce it
susceptibility to normal accidents.

Notwithstanding, it is obviously a good idea to improve the fitness-for-purpose of the operational
information systems if one can. Concerning those, there are not only books and papers but quite a
lot of relevant standards. Karsten Loer has a better handle on that than I do. He did most of the
standards-review for a joint paper we presented in March on the topic. Karsten is on the list.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de