Are you Alert or just Waiting dear M2M machine

ALERT

Are you alert, or is it just waiting for the situation to pass.  Are you alert for something which might happen, something perhaps with danger requiring your constant situational awareness, or is it just waiting for the expected alarm when the pressure gets to high.

To what extent we confuse normal events, like the sun coming up and the sun going down with an alert meaning something just broke and you are in trouble or security was breached and you need to shutdown or burn everything.

Alerts are the output of a process which is monitoring the 'danger' domain, and the production of alerts needs to be meaningful, particularly when possibly mixed with Alarms, Events, Off-Normals and basic normal data.

How might we best characterize them ?

• Normal Data : No need to look at it - no need to act - maybe to fine tune - maybe to optimize, but no real danger involved and not a high priority.
• Event Data : Events record what happens, usually on a change of status of an item of plant, or perhaps an operator action for later audit purposes.
• ALARM : Alarms record a transgression of a limit or potential hazard developing.  Alarms are useful for managing situations post a disturbance event.
• ALERT : Alerts are a new category for most and I like to refer to Alerts as being from a higher form of intelligence and or situational awareness which characterize and inform of imminent danger or unexpected behaviour.

When observing animal behavior in the wild, you will see that the animal engages all of it's senses and the senses of it's herd to determine whether there is danger or not.  Animals often go from relaxed or waiting to high stages of alert within seconds based on the situation.  It is generally not just one input, but many which need to be correlated to determine that 'danger exists' and it is the function of 'situational assessment' to figure out whether 'danger' could exist.

Whether real-time systems are intelligent enough to correlate enough data to provide a higher level of reasoning required for an ALERT is a debate to be had, however we are now approaching the levels of computing and industrial software capability to provide a higher order ALERT system rather than the simpler more fundamental Data, Events and Alarm systems currently implemented.

Photo: Alert by paralog  under licence CC BY-ND 2.0

Man vs Machine

Alert ! - situational awareness, the concept of knowing a complex dynamic
situation and being able to decide and act on it quickly, and more importantly, decide better and faster than the adversary would have.  Situational Awareness[SA] seems to have derived out of aerial combat and the complex spaces which arise in air traffic control towers.  More recently there have been some papers written about the application to the complex dynamic situations which can now arise in the modern industrial/process control room.

 who is the enemy ?

It all seems good, however I wonder if there is a basic premise that is being missed.

John Boyd, a great military strategist defined the OODA [Observe Orient Decide Act] loop for the benefit of better understanding how combatant strategies can be modelled and their interaction determined. Situational Awareness has adopted this model and defines itself as the state of knowledge pertaining to a dynamic situation or filtering of that knowledge to enable fast strategic decisions to be made.  Shifting from the military domain to the industrial domain, one is left wondering how situational awareness in the classic sense really applies. Who is the enemy ?

For the military situation, an fighter's strategy or tactics are in play continually against the enemy, yet in the plant, the operator is not pitted against an intelligent machine [at least not yet] but rather has to control the machine for an emerging situation which might generally be unforeseen.  The operator's frame is not continually shifting, but dealing with well know operational points.

Some of the process of Situational Assessment, or the gathering of appropriate data to enable fast real-time operational decisions to be made should be effective for control rooms, but the requirement to continually shift the awareness frame based on an enemy counter strategy seems not to apply.
Therefore - does the rest of the whole set of situational awareness technologies really apply ?

Feel free to comment on situational awareness in general and more specifically the way it might work for your control room situation.

References
The role of Situation Awareness for the Operators of Process Industry Salman Nazir, Simone Colombo, Davide Manca*

John Boyd's OODA Loop Wiki