A testbed for studying the interactions between human operators and advanced control systems

Industrial chemical processes are operated under closed-loop control while being supervised by human operators. The low-level regulatory controllers are often supplemented by advanced multivariate control such as Model Predictive Control (MPC). Since MPC is complex, its control actions can be non-intuitive to the operator. The operator may turn off any controller if they suspect the control actions triggered by it. Hence, it is imperative to understand the operator's interaction with automation. In this work, we develop a testbed with the potential to understand the operator's confidence in MPC through a human factors approach. The testbed consists of a multi-unit chemical process instrumented with various sensors, multiple low-level SISO control loops, and a highlevel MPC. The testbed is instrumented with a mechanism to record keystrokes, mouse movements, and mouse clicks to observe the operators' interactions with the process (during various fault scenarios) through the provided Human Machine Interface.