Workload Change Over Time for Nuclear Power Plant Operation Tasks

Abstract

Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) operation requires multiple task types to complete necessary day-to-day activities and operating procedures. The accurate completion of these tasks is necessary for safety-critical domains, as errors and omissions can potentially result in severe consequences. As a result, it is important to determine the cause of human error within various task types. One factor that contributes to human performance is workload. The present experiment is a follow-up, further investigating levels of workload, within a NPP simulated environment, with experienced participants. EEG, ECG, and the NASA-TLX have been shown to be sensitive to changes in workload across domains and are thus utilized in the present experiment to record workload differences. Specifically, the present experiment investigated these participants across 27 sessions for three different NPP task types –checking, detection, and response implementation.

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