The impact of computer-based procedures on team performance,communication, and situation awareness

In nuclear power plants, operating procedures are adopted to aid the operators in performing their tasks. With the evolution of computer hardware and software, the analog human-machine systems of the main control room in the nuclear power plant have been replaced with digital systems. Moreover, automated operations now outnumber manual operations. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of computer-based procedures on the team performance, communication, and situation awareness of operators in the main control room. To achieve the purpose, a within-subjects experiment was designed and then a survey was conducted. The results showed that the teams had better objective performance and higher situation awareness when using computer-based procedures. In addition, the teams also had lower human error and lower communication rates when using computer-based procedures. This study proposes that computer-based procedures are advantageous to the operation of the systems of the main control rooms in nuclear power plants.Relevance to industryComputerized procedures system is one of the specific features for advanced nuclear power plant. This study explores and analyzes the team performance, communication, and situation awareness difference between paper-based, electronic, and computer-based procedures in detail. It may provide practical information for how to apply computer-based procedures to perform the tasks in the main control room of the advanced nuclear power plant.     

Who benefits from simulator training: Personality and heart rate variability in relation to situation awareness during navigation training

Objective

This study tested the relationship between individual differences and Situation Awareness (SA) during training in a navigation simulator.

Background

Simulators have become an important tool in the training and education of maritime personnel with a view to improving decisions and performance. There are a few, inconclusive empirical studies that have focused on mapping personality characteristics and their link to the ability to generate and maintain SA during simulator training.

Method

Thirty-six first-year students from the Royal Norwegian Navy Officer Candidate School participated in the study. SA was measured using both subjective and observer ratings.

Results

The results indicated that low scores on Neuroticism and high scores on Extraversion and Conscientiousness (resilient personality type) predicted both subjective and observer-rated SA. Furthermore, participants with high SA were able to modulate their Heart Rate Variability (HRV), with suppression of HRV during navigation training as well showing recovery of HRV.

Application

The potential applications of this research include the assessment of personality differences as a tool in selecting navigators, and the use of HRV as an objective index of adaptability to environmental demands.     

Analysis of information exchange activities to actualize and validate situation awareness during shift changeovers in nuclear power plants

Shift work situations occur in almost all safety‐critical organizations, and the investigations of some catastrophes like Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, and the Gol/Legacy mid‐air collision indicated that shift work information exchange played an important role during the evolution of the situation before the accidents. Inadequate communications during shift changeovers challenged operators' work in the moments that preceded these accidents, because they got inadequate information about the current situation. Our research focuses on the information exchange activities (verbal, written, and nonverbal) of nuclear power plant control operators during shift changeovers. Our aim is to investigate how verbal exchanges and other representations enable operator crews to share information regarding the events that occurred in the previous shift to achieve adequate situation awareness. Our findings indicated the importance and richness of the information exchange during the shift changeover process to update and validate individual and collective situation awareness, showing that information adequately shared enables the ad hoc configurations of regulation loops and a safer use of simplified strategies that can be understood and be validated by other operators, reducing the occurrence of cognitive overloads and contributing to the construction of a common cognitive ground that enhances system resilience. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Development of a situation awareness measure to evaluate advanced alarm systems in nuclear power plant control rooms

The process controller is required to remain updated regarding developments in the dynamically changing process state, this being referred to as the maintenance of situation awareness. Alarm systems play an important role within this task, and therefore a measure of how effective the system is for enhancing the operator's situation awareness is desirable. One proposed measure is the Situation Awareness Control Room Inventory (SACRI). The methods and results of four simulator studies undertaken to develop and evaluate SACRI are outlined in this paper. It is concluded that SACRI is of use alongside measures such as detection time and diagnostic accuracy in simulator-based evaluations of alarm system design.     

Observational assessment of situation awareness,team differences and training implications

The two goals were to investigate, first, the practicability and reliability of observational assessment of team situation awareness (SA) and, second, the nature of any team differences, their consistency and training implications. Five shift teams tackled three scenarios, each with three probe events concerning SA, and three observers viewed and rated concurrently each shift. This methodology was found to be practicable and achieved satisfactory rater reliability as indicated by intraclass and inter-rater correlations. Team differences in SA emerged although there was no consistent pattern. A retrospective analysis of individual and team behaviours relating to SA was performed using the Critical Incident Technique. A total of 75 incidents and 20 behavioural dimensions relevant to SA were identified and these were subsumed under planning, problem solving, team coordination, attention, communication and knowledge. These findings are discussed with regard to the nature and measurement of SA, and the content of training to improve SA for control room teams.     

Human performance metrics for the nuclear domain: A tool for evaluating measures of workload,situation awareness and teamwork

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has developed a tool to support the understanding and evaluation of workload (WL), situation awareness (SA), and teamwork (TW) metrics used in human factors engineering (HFE) programs for commercial nuclear power plants (NPPs). This article summarizes the NRC report on the tool, and discusses its potential application to other industries. The operational relevance of WL, SA and TW to the NPP domain is reviewed, and challenges associated with the development of valid metrics for these constructs are identified. The Generic Metrics Catalog (GMC) is a database that compiles information about WL, SA, and TW metrics in a readily accessible and easy to use format. It provides information about the psychometric properties of a metric and the soundness of the methods used to investigate these properties. In the evaluation of a proposed HFE in an NPP license application, the Decision Making Wizard (DMW) uses reviewer input and information found in the GMC to identify areas of concern in applications. Tools of this kind may be especially valuable in other domains for managing challenges of novel technologies such as automation, human-robot teaming and augmented cognition.     

Exploring schema-driven differences in situation awareness between road users: an on-road study of driver,cyclist and motorcyclist situation awareness

Collisions between different road users make a substantial contribution to road trauma. Although evidence suggests that different road users interpret the same road situations differently, it is not clear how road users' situation awareness differs, nor is it clear which differences might lead to conflicts. This article presents the findings from an on-road study conducted to examine driver, motorcyclist and cyclist situation awareness in different road environments. The findings suggest that, in addition to minor differences in the structure of different road users' situation awareness (i.e. amount of information and how it is integrated), the actual content of situation awareness in terms of road user schemata, the resulting interaction with the world and the information underpinning situation awareness is markedly different. Further examination indicates that the differences are likely to be compatible along arterial roads, shopping strips and at roundabouts, but that they may create conflicts between different road users at intersections. Interventions designed to support compatible situation awareness and behaviour between different road users are discussed.     

Context-aware temporal network representation of event logs: Model and methods for process performance analysis

Analysing performance of business processes is an important vehicle to improve their operation. Specifically, an accurate assessment of sojourn times and remaining times enables bottleneck analysis and resource planning. Recently, methods to create respective performance models from event logs have been proposed. These works have several limitations, though: They either consider control-flow and performance information separately, or rely on an ad-hoc selection of temporal relations between events. In this paper, we introduce the Temporal Network Representation (TNR) of a log. It is based on Allen’s interval algebra, comprises the pairwise temporal relations for activity executions, and potentially incorporates the context in which these relations have been observed. We demonstrate the usefulness of the TNR for detecting (unrecorded) delays and for probabilistic mining of variants when modelling the performance of a process. In order to compare different models from the performance perspective, we further develop a framework for measuring performance fitness. Under this framework, TNR-based process discovery is guaranteed to dominate existing techniques in measuring performance characteristics of a process. In addition, we show how contextual information in terms of the congestion levels of the process can be mined in order to further improve capabilities for performance analysis. To illustrate the practical value of the proposed models, we evaluate our approaches with three real-life datasets. Our experiments show that the TNR yields an improvement in performance fitness over state-of-the-art algorithms, while congestion learning is able to accurately reconstruct congestion levels from event data.     

Comparative performance study of QN and LM algorithms in predictive control for NNARX-identified model of hydro-power plant

In this paper input-constrained predictive control strategy for NNARX (neural network non-linear auto-regression with exogenous signal) model of hydro-turbine is presented. The input (gate position) and output (turbine power) data are generated by means of dynamic plant model. The collected data are utilized to develop the NNARX model of the plant. Then NN-based predictive control (NNPC) scheme is applied to control the turbine power. The control cost function (CCF) includes the squared difference between the model predicted output and desired response and a weighted squared change in the control signal. The CCF is minimized with both Quasi-Newton and Levenberg–Marquardt iterative algorithms. To demonstrate the suitability of the strategy, the plant has been simulated on two different reference signals. An erratum to this article can be found at