Household Customers’ Cost of Interruption: Survey Study on Summer Electricity Peak of Xi’an City

In light of China’s Carbon Neutrality Target and facing the fluctuating pressure of power supply brought on by new energy intermittent power generation, it is urgent to mobilize a large number of residential flexible loads that can respond instantaneously to mitigate peak–valley difference. Under a framework of demand-side management (DSM) and utility analysis, we empirically investigate customers’ costs from interrupting typical electrical terminals at the household level. Specifically, by using the contingent valuation method (CVM), we explore the factors that affect households’ Willingness to Accept (WTA) of voluntarily participating in the interruption management during the summer electricity peak and estimate the distribution of households’ WTA values. We find that given the value of WTA, households’ participation rate in the interruption management significantly decreases with the increase in interruption duration and varies with the type of terminal appliance that is on direct interruption management. Moreover, the majority of households are willing to participate in the interruption management even if the compensation amount is low. The factors that determine households’ WTA and the size of their influences vary with the type of electrical terminal. The results imply that differentiating the terminal electricity market and accurately locking on the target terminals by considering the household heterogeneity can reduce the household welfare losses arising from DSM.

Severity-Mapped Vibrotactile Cues to Support Interruption Management with Weather Messaging in the General Aviation Cockpit

Despite the increasing availability of technologies that provide access to aviation weather information in the cockpit, weather remains a prominent contributor to general aviation (GA) accidents. Pilots fail to detect the presence of new weather information, misinterpret it, or otherwise fail to act appropriately on it. When cognitive demands imposed by concurrent flight tasks are high, the risks increase for each of these failure modes. Previous research shows how introducing vibrotactile cues can help ease or redistribute some of these demands, but there is untapped potential in exploring how vibratory cues can facilitate “interruption management”, i.e., fitting the processing of available weather information into flight task workflow. In the current study, GA pilots flew a mountainous terrain scenario in a flight training device while receiving, processing, and acting on various weather information messages that were displayed visually, in graphical and text formats, on an experimental weather display. Half of the participants additionally received vibrotactile cues via a connected smartwatch with patterns that conveyed the “severity” of the message, allowing pilots to make informed decisions about when to fully attend to and process the message. Results indicate that weather messages were acknowledged more often and faster when accompanied by the vibrotactile cues, but the time after acknowledgment to fully process the messages was not significantly affected by vibrotactile cuing, nor was overall situation awareness. These findings illustrate that severity-encoded vibrotactile cues can support pilot awareness of updated weather as well as task management in processing weather messages while managing concurrent flight demands.

Human Interruption Management in Workplace Environments: An Overview

Interruptions are unexpected breaks that introduce new tasks on top of ongoing activities. In work environments, interruptions occur when operators and decision-makers have to deal simultaneously with several stimuli and information sources and have to make decisions so as to maintain the flow of activities at a satisfactory level of performance or quality of service. The causes and effects of interruptions and their subsequent management strategies in workplace environments have been researched in the past, however, only a few review articles are available to report on current advances in this area, to analyze contributions, and to highlight open research directions. This paper offers an up-to-date review and a framework for interruptions and interruption management strategies. The current approaches to identify, report, and manage interruptions in a variety of workplace environments are reviewed and a description of environmental characteristics that favor the occurrence of interruptions and influence interruption management in workplace environments is provided. Various approaches to classify and model the different types of interruptions and their cause-consequence relationships are discussed and the strategies to manage interruptions and approaches to measure human performance when dealing with interruptions are analyzed. Based on these insights, several guidelines to manage interruptions in workplace environments are provided, and future research directions are highlighted.

A Real-Time Interruption Management System Based on Eye-Tracking Data

Interruptions in the middle of a task have considerable costs. The objective of this study was to develop a system that postpones interruptions when they occur in periods of high workload. In Experiment 1, an air traffic control (ATC) simulator was presented with varying working memory demands. Pupil data were used to train a range of machine-learning classifiers to distinguish between high and low workload moments. The Gradient Boosted Tree (GBT) provided the best predictions. In Experiment 2, this classifier was used to develop a real-time interruption management system (IMS). The role of the IMS was to predict high and low workload and to postpone interruptions to the next low workload moment. To examine the IMS’s performance, its interruptions were compared to random interruptions. Results showed that the IMS successfully identified high and low workload moments with 76% accuracy, and postponed interruptions to the next low workload moment.

Development of Attentional Skills Training for Operators of Unmanned Aerial Systems

The operators of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) have multiple screens of information they need to monitor, and numerous interruptions that challenge them in their work. Research on attentional training has revealed that it is possible to train operators to improve their visual scanning, prioritization, and interruption management performance. This paper describes the analyses that were conducted to identify the information processing requirements associated with UAS tasks and the integration of findings into a prototype attentional skills training tool. This tool uses adaptive scenario-based training to improve the attentional management skills of UAS sensor operators.