A promising approach to reduce the time to market of chemical products is the application of modular plants, which are composed of standardized, previously developed Process Equipment Assemblies (PEAs). As this approach goes along with process intensification as well as continuous and highly autonomous operation, human operator performance might benefit from a more structured guidance to fully understand the system and interact with it whenever it is necessary. With the major goal of reducing human error, Vicente and Rasmussen (1990) introduced the Ecological Interface Design (EID), suggesting that an interface should provide a virtual ecology, connecting the work domain to the human operator. EID is based on Work Domain Analysis (WDA), which is a 2-dimensional Abstraction-Decomposition Space. The decomposition hierarchy in the horizontal direction gives information about the superficial structure of the plant; while, the abstraction hierarchy in vertical direction provides multi-level knowledge representation of how each component in the process is working.

In this study, the effects of applying EID for modular plants is investigated. To this end, a pilot modular plant, namely Safety-Demonstrator (Pelzer et al., 2021), has been considered as the use case. It consists of a total of two PEAs: one for feeding the reactants and the other one for the reaction. At first, WDA has been done for this modular plant, and afterwards an EID has been developed. This approach not only helps operator understanding the system and making better decisions in challenging situations, but also shows potential to facilitate exploiting the changeability feature of MPs and selecting the best PEAs for a specific function of the process.