Engineering Application of a Product Quality Testing Method within the SCADA System Operator Education Quality Assessment Process

An education system can be considered as an anthropotechnical system consisting of an education subject (e.g., trainee, operator), examiner (teacher), system decision maker (e.g., teaching module coordinator), and the environment (e.g., administrative, social, IT). The outcomes of this system are the knowledge and skills acquired by a trained student. The educational effect is usually diagnosed in the form of an exam or test. The study addresses the issue related to the credibility of applied assessment methods, knowledge qualification levels, and assessment errors. The analysis is conducted in accordance with the principles applied in statistical quality control when studying product population defectiveness. Using known methods for testing product defectiveness, the authors characterized the trainee educational effect (i.e., his/her knowledge and skill level) in a technical manner. The probability of an event wherein the examined person demonstrating a specific knowledge level achieves an adequate grade, has been adopted as the reliability measure. The conducted calculations provided graphs of the reliability functions involving the grades received within the “traditional” examination and testing process. The authors suggested an application that tests a SCADA system user, based on tools known to the trainee. The application was developed using the SCADA suite used as a visualization element in distributed control systems. This application enables the automation of the operator diagnosis process.