Integrated design of system display and procedural display in advanced NPP control rooms

Abstract

When dealing with abnormities, operators’ display-management workload takes up much attention resource, bringing about safety issues. This study is based on the idea of a procedure-integrated display design, which has passed preliminary testing in a previous study. The new design introduces navigation system that coordinates the two types of displays, and adapt this procedure-integrated display to real NPP HSI requirements. The procedure-integrated display has been realized on a simulated control room platform under two scenarios. The fully-developed system emulates all functions and effects in a real NPP control room. We invite two highly-experienced operators for usability testing, and four NPP experts for review. Evaluation result shows that this procedure-integrated display is applicable to help operators improve performance and reduce mental workload. Testing also reveals that the disorientation level is low in the new navigation system, and operators report high acceptance and learnability towards the new design. By analyzing the results from the two parts of evaluations, this paper discusses an improved design.