Meta-Level Design Guidance and Operator Performance Measures for Hybrid Control Rooms

Technical Report · Wed Sep 19 00:00:00 EDT 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1475171· OSTI ID:1475171

Weinger, Matthew B. ^[1]; Brown, Clinton ^[1]

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1. Vanderbilt Univ., Nashville, TN (United States)

The purpose of this grant was to refine and test methods to evaluate digital human system interfaces (HSI) for existing largely analog nuclear power plant (NPP) control rooms (CRs). We hypothesized that CR operator performance (CROP) in hybrid NPP CRs will be improved if future digital HSI is designed based on: 1) more robust design guidelines for operator situation awareness (SA) and decision-making (DM); 2) enhanced CROP metrics during HSI evaluation; 3) an ontology for selecting simulation scenarios to evaluate digital HSI; and 4) a model to predict optimal HSI design attributes given CROP objectives. The team conducted numerous nuclear power plant site visits (e.g., to Brown’s Ferry, Palo Verde, Sequoyah and Vogtle) to study control room operations and crisis management and 3 visits to the NRC Chattanooga Training Center. We observed research studies at DC Cook and NRC Chattanooga in collaboration with the Halden Reactor Project. We collected operator performance and workload data in one NPP simulator. A comprehensive human (i.e., CROP) performance literature review was published in Applied Ergonomics. We obtained operator team performance data from CAER to produce our data fusion model and a paper delineating the results have been accepted (revision submitted) in Resilience Engineering and System Safety. We analyzed interview data related to scenario ontology development; a manuscript is still in preparation.

• Research Organization: Vanderbilt Univ., Nashville, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
• DOE Contract Number: NE0008267
• OSTI ID: 1475171
• Report Number(s): NE0008267
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English