Empirically evaluating and developing alarm rate standards for liquid pipeline control room operators

The liquid and gas pipeline conununity has recently been faced with the challenge of new governmental regulations set forth by Congress which are being implemented by PHMSA (an arm of the DOT). These new governmental regulations need to understand the role of the human-in-the-loop as part of alarm management systems. To investigate alarm rate standards a repeated measures design was developed that included a series of ten (1 0) operator scenarios utilizing high fidelity liquid pipeline simulation software (Stoner Pipeline Simulator). Participants completed two subsets of experiments, five were completed using an alarm display presenting alarms by time (chronological) and the remaining five experiments were completed using a categorical alarm display (by alarm priority).