More About Operator Monitoring under Normal Operations: The Role of Workload Regulation and the Impact of Control Room Technology

Abstract

This paper is part of a research program that we have been conducting to better understand how operators monitor a nuclear power plant under normal operations. A field study was conducted in a modern plant that has more automation and more computer-based displays than the two plants that we had observed in previous studies. Eleven operators were observed for a total of approximately 88 hours. The findings suggest that operators actively adopt strategies to regulate their workload so as not to exceed their resource constraints. In addition, the results suggest that computer-based control rooms require operators to have more knowledge about the interface (not the plant itself) than do the older analog, hard-wired control rooms. Moreover, computer-based designs require operators to reduce the degrees of freedom in the design to have context-sensitive information, whereas hard-wired designs require operators to expand the degrees of freedom.

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