User-defined information sharing for team situation awareness and teamwork

Abstract

Team members have different roles in various scenarios to maintain situation awareness. A collaborative system should therefore provide appropriate information to the appropriate person at an appropriate time. Considering the mismatch between the designed and actually used information, this paper proposed that users should define what information to share with their team-mates. Thirty-six participants, who formed eighteen teams, used both the traditional and user-defined shared displays to perform failure diagnosis on the context of nuclear power plants. The user-defined shared display exhibited shorter diagnosis time without significant difference in correctness. Information quality, instead of quantity, was positively correlated with team mutual awareness. This study provides empirical evidence that user-defined information sharing is effective at improving operator’s diagnosis performance, so the users should be able to tailor the information based on requirements.Practitioner Summary: To support team situation awareness and teamwork, the present study proposed that users should define what information to share with their team-mates. The laboratory experiment shows that user-defined information sharing shortens operator diagnosis time without degrading correctness. Information quality appears more important than information quantity in enhancing team mutual awareness.     

Mutual awareness: Enhanced by interface design and improving team performance in incident diagnosis under computerized working environment

Mutual Awareness, which measures understanding of the behaviors and status of other members in a team is supposed to influence team decision-making process in safety-critical tasks/systems. This study aims to explore enhancement of mutual awareness by adding a Mutual Awareness Tool (MAT) on a user interface and examining its effects on team diagnosis performance in emergency situations of a simulated nuclear power plant system. According to the experimental results, the embedded MAT on the operation interface enhanced team mutual awareness significantly, and improved incident diagnosis performance. The results also showed that the increase in mutual awareness led to a reduction of individual situation awareness, possibly due to the limited mental resources.     

Coordination-behavior patterns of control crews in digital nuclear power plants during emergencies from a network perspective: An exploratory study

This study aims to investigate the coordination-behavior patterns of control crews in digital nuclear power plants (NPPs) during emergencies from a network perspective. We observed and coded 12 coordination processes (each from one crew) of handling simulated emergencies on a full-scope dynamic simulator in Tianwan NPP of China. By calculating the proportion of coordination breakdowns and referring to the subjective evaluation of instructors, these control crews (all male) were classified into two performance levels (high and low). To compare the coordination-behavior patterns between high- and low-performing crews, we conducted social network analysis based on the number and direction of coordination behaviors. By examining intracrew relations in team coordination, this study indicated that high-performing crews exhibited higher cohesion and more balanced behavioral patterns in team coordination than low-performing ones. By investigating coordination-behavior patterns from the hierarchical structure of relations in the team, this study revealed that high-performing crews exhibited higher degree of team autonomy and self-management among junior operators, as well as reactor operator (RO)-centered pattern, whereas the low-performing crews exhibited senior reactor operator-centered pattern. For researchers, the results advance the understanding of the team coordination mechanism in NPP control rooms during emergencies and enrich team coordination theory in process control industries from the network perspective. In practice, this study suggested that the team coordination training of NPP control crews might be centered around junior operators (especially RO), with focuses on facilitating information sharing and mutual assistance between junior operators and enhancing the awareness of active cooperation of crew members. The results of the study provide nuclear instructors with practical reference to team coordination training and processes optimization.     

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.     

Evaluation of ecological interface design for nuclear process control: situation awareness effects

OBJECTIVE: We determine whether an ecological interface display for nuclear power plant operations supports improved situation awareness over traditional and user-centered displays in a realistic environment. BACKGROUND: Ecological interface design (EID) has not yet been fully evaluated with real operators facing realistic scenarios. METHOD: Ecological displays were evaluated alongside traditional and user-centered "advanced" displays in a full-scope nuclear power plant simulation. Licensed plant operators used the displays in realistic scenarios that either had procedural support or did not have procedural support. All three displays were evaluated for their ability to support operator situation awareness. RESULTS: A significant three-way interaction effect was observed on two independent measures of situation awareness. For both measures, ecological displays improved situation awareness in scenarios that did not have procedural support, primarily in the detection phases of those scenarios. No other pronounced effects appeared across both measures. CONCLUSIONS: The observed improvement was sufficiently large to suggest that EID could improve situation awareness in situations where procedures are unavailable. However, the EID displays did not lead to improved situation awareness in the other conditions of the evaluation, and participants using these displays occasionally underperformed on single measures of situation awareness. This suggests that the approach requires further development, particularly in integrating EID with procedural support. APPLICATION: This research has important findings for the ongoing development of the EID approach, the design of industrial operator displays, and design to support situation awareness.     

Developing a taxonomy of coordination behaviours in nuclear power plant control rooms during emergencies

Abstract

This study aims to develop a taxonomy of coordination behaviours during emergencies in nuclear power plants (NPPs). We summarised basic coordination behaviours from literature in aviation, health care and nuclear field and identified coordination behaviours specific to the nuclear domain by interviewing and surveying control crew operators. The established taxonomy includes 7 workflow stages and 24 basic coordination behaviours. To evaluate the reliability and feasibility of the taxonomy, we analysed 12 videos of operators’ training sessions by coding coordination behaviours with the taxonomy and the inter-rater reliability was acceptable. Further analysis of the frequency, the duration and the direction of the coordination behaviours revealed four coordination problems. This taxonomy provides a foundation of systematic observation of coordination behaviours among NPP crews, advances researchers’ understanding of the coordination mechanism during emergencies in NPPs and facilitate the possibility to deepen the understanding of the relationships between coordination behaviours and team performance.

Practitioner Summary: A taxonomy of coordination behaviours during emergencies in nuclear power plants was developed. Reliability and feasibility of the taxonomy was verified through the analysis of 12 training sessions. The taxonomy can serve as an observation system for analysis of coordination behaviours and help to identify coordination problems of control crews.     

Implications of We-Awareness to the Design of Distributed Groupware Tools

We-awareness is the socially recursive inferences that let collaborators know that all are mutually aware of each other’s awareness. While we-awareness is easy afforded in face to face collocated collaboration, it is much more difficult to design distributed groupware tools to provide equivalent capabilities: there can be no awareness unless it is programmed in via system features. We identify a series of questions that must be considered if we-awareness is to be supported. What types of awareness information is crucial and should thus be added to the ‘blank slate’ of a screen sharing system? How can that awareness information be captured through technology, and what information will be lost during this capture process? How should that information be translated, transformed and encoded into a digital form, and—as part of that—what information will be altered as part of that translation process? How will that information be transmitted, and what are the network effects in terms of that information being received in a timely manner? How will that information be represented to other participants in order to enable the rich and subtle interactions that occur in the face-to-face setting? We illustrate the nuances of these questions and why they are difficult to answer by revisiting several prior technical solutions to we-awareness.     

Preventing undesirable effects of mutual trust and the development of skepticism in virtual groups by applying the knowledge and information awareness approach

Empirical studies have proven the effectiveness of the knowledge and information awareness approach of Engelmann and colleagues for improving collaboration and collaborative problem-solving performance of spatially distributed group members. This approach informs group members about both their collaborators’ knowledge structures and their collaborators’ information. In the current study, we investigated whether this implicit approach reduces undesirable effects of mutual trust and mutual skepticism. Trust is an important influencing factor with regard to behavior and performance of groups. High mutual trust can have a negative impact on group effectiveness because it reduces mutual control and, as a result, the detection of the others’ mistakes. In an empirical study, 20 triads collaborating with the knowledge and information awareness approach were compared with 20 triads collaborating without this approach. The members of a triad were spatially distributed and participated in a computer-supported collaboration. The results demonstrated that the availability of the knowledge and information awareness approach overrides the negative impact of too much mutual trust and counteracts the development of mutual skepticism. This study contributes to further clarifying the impact of trust on effectiveness and efficiency of virtual groups depending upon different situational contexts.     

基于视频的车辆碰撞事件预测算法研究

近年来,基于数字图象处理的交通事件检测技术应用日益广泛。本文应用了隐马克夫模型进行高速公路上的车辆碰撞预测。本文首先通过车辆跟踪得到车辆的运动信息,然后根据提取的车辆相互运动信息利用HMM模型判断碰撞事件发生的概率。实验证明,该方法有效可行。     

基于HMM的车辆碰撞事件预测

近年来,基于数字图像处理的交通事件检测技术应用日益广泛.本文应用了隐马尔可夫模型进行高速公路上的车辆碰撞预测.本文首先通过车辆跟踪得到车辆的运动信息,然后根据提取的车辆相互运动信息利用HMM模型判断碰撞事件发生的概率.实验证明,该方法有效可行.     

Operators’ orientations to procedure guidance in NPP process control

Resilience in nuclear power plant (NPP) process control depends, among other things, on balance between operators’ autonomy in online decisions and pre-defined guidance for operations. Striking balance between these inherent demands of process control belongs to the strategic decisions by the management, but finally balancing takes place at the sharp end, by the operating personnel. We studied operators’ basic assumptions about the role of operating procedures in action. Conceptions of 62 control room operators at two Finnish NPPs were queried. Answers were classified into theory-based categories, i.e., interpretative, confirmative or reactive orientations. Orientation is an epistemic attitude to work that influences the process and content of sense making in situations that require action. In both NPPs, the confirmative orientation, emphasising the importance of acting according to rules, prevails, which corresponds to the expectations set by the organisations. It was also found that orientations reflect the operator roles and their demands: Among turbine operators, the interpretative orientation is significantly more prevalent than among the reactor operators as regards control of action. All operators consider interpretative orientation as a characteristic of a “good operator”. It is concluded that interpretative orientation represents an epistemic attitude to NPP operator work, in which autonomy based on operators’ professional competence and procedure usage is not seen opposite to each other, but intertwined into a practice. Identification interpretativeness as an epistemic attitude relevant in action extends the notion of “intelligent use of procedures” proposed earlier, by elaborating the inherent logic and ethos of operators’ procedure usage. It is recommended that appropriation of interpretative orientation should be actively supported as a means to facilitate resilience in NPP activity.     

A Review of Alarm System Design for Advanced Control Rooms of Nuclear Power Plants

Alarm systems are designed to provide cues to make operators aware of an operational problem, so that mitigation actions can be taken. New technologies are enabling innovative designs of alarm systems for safety-critical systems. To help better design alarm systems in advanced control rooms of nuclear power plants (NPPs), recent researches on alarm system design in the NPP domain are reviewed from the following aspects: (1) functions of an alarm system and opportunities and challenges of new technologies; (2) effects of alarm floods and different alarm management methods; (3) visual presentation of alarm information; (4) evaluation criteria for alarm systems. Through the comprehensive literature review, this article proposes research topics related to human factors and ergonomics that are worth studying in advanced alarm systems of NPPs.     

Awareness support for asynchronous engineering collaboration

This study addresses collaboration awareness for asynchronous distributed engineering collaboration with computer‐aided design (CAD) browsers. An analysis of the characteristics of asynchronous collaboration identified the information that needs to be presented. Two features for a CAD browser system, team member information enhancement and task information enhancement, were designed to improve collaborator and task awareness. An experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of the new proposed features. The results of the experiment indicated the following. First, the enhancement of team member information and task information improved collaboration efficiency by 8.1 and 20.2%, respectively. Second, for asynchronous collaboration, the availability and workload of team members need to be presented rather than capturing and presenting dynamic information about team members. Third, the information about the status of each task, such as the progress, time passed, and dependability, needs to be enhanced for efficient collaboration. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Hum Factors Man 13: 97–113, 2003.     

An inference method of team situation awareness based on mutual awareness

Team situation awareness (TSA) is a critical contributing factor in establishing collaborative relations among team members involved in cooperative activity. Currently, however, there is still a lack of a clearly understandable and commonly agreeable model of TSA. To resolve misunderstanding or conflict among team members or between a team and machines, our research aim is to find out the underlying mechanism of TSA that reflects team cognitive process in a way consistent with team cooperative activity, and to focus on how to achieve mutual understanding, and how to effectively incorporate human teams into a socio-technological system. In this paper, we argue that earlier models of TSA, where TSA was discussed as the intersection of situation awareness (SA) owned by individual team members, are inadequate for study of a sophisticated team reciprocal process. We suggest that it is necessary for the definition of TSA to integrate the notion of individual SA (ISA) into cooperative team activity. In particular, understanding of mutual awareness is an essential element in cooperative activity. We propose a new notion of TSA, which is reducible to mutual beliefs as well as ISA at three levels. Further, we develop an operational TSA inference method and discuss human competence and system-related factors that are required to build TSA. We then try to demonstrate how TSA is actively constructed via inferencing practices. We also develop criteria to assess appropriateness of TSA from two aspects: soundness and completeness of mutual beliefs. Comparison of evaluation results indicates that the notion of TSA proposed in this work is more suitable to depict team cooperative activity than conventional ones.     

基于TRACEr失误辨识方法的电网调度人因风险认知分析

辨识和分析电网调度中的人为失误对于防范和控制人因风险、保障电网安全稳定运行至关重要。人为失误预测和确认方法在复杂系统的设计、评估和运行中已得到了广泛应用。结合电网调度业务知识和认知心理学模型,对认知差错追溯和预测技术(Technique for Ret-rospective and Predictive Analysis of Cognitive Errors,TRACEr)进行了分析和改进,研究了其在电网调度人为风险分析中的应用。运用提出的人为失误分析方法,对电网调度中的人因风险案例进行了分析,结果表明,基于TRACEr失误辨识方法能较为全面地分析电网调度员的人为失误,并为失误的补救和防范提供有效的改进措施。     

The disclosure of evaporating digital trails respecting the combinations of Gmail and IE for pervasive multimedia

Unquestionably, the proliferation of mobile devices has dominated the main streams in contemporary ubiquitous wireless networks. Unfortunately, the misappropriating of those state-of-the-art gadgets has resulted in unprecedented information security issues in next generation cyberspace security arena. This paper illustrates the essence of generic procedures to provide the probative digital evidences for a typical Gmail Chat session in connection with the IE browser under different scenarios. When the computer-related information security issues arise with regard to the company, the corporate information incident response team should be able to disclose and preserve the evaporating digital trails following the right procedures to avoid the volatile characteristics in their natures. Furthermore, the design of the experiments of the paper identifies four cases to demonstrate the feasibility, availability, reliability, and traceability among them, which are essential for the corporate information security staffs to seriously consider when mushrooming cyber crimes are unknowingly and hastily burgeoning in an unparalleled manner. The organizations might have to scrutinize the negligible digital trails with cognitive expertise instead of entirely relying on law enforcement agencies from the public sectors due to the time constraints as well as publicity concerns or the minor computing resource policy violation unwarily occurred by the employees accordingly.     

The Design of Human–Machine Interface for Accident Support in Nuclear Power Plants

As feedback from Three Mile Island No. 2, a large amount of human–machine interface (HMI) design has been proposed to support operators during accidents by presenting information on plant status, some of which is implemented in commercial nuclear power plants (NPPs). However, it has not yet been discussed what role HMI should play under conditions where operators must take action as instructed under emergency operating procedure. Regarding this principal issue, an HMI design is proposed together with specific screen images. The advantage of this design is based on the involvement of an ex-operator in NPP in this paper. The participation of users in the design of HMI has been rare. Accordingly the proposed HMI is comprehensive for average operators and is expected to be acceptable for future implementation in commercial NPPs. The effectiveness of the proposed HMI has been examined in a small experiment.     

ROME4EU – A service‐oriented process‐aware information system for mobile devices

Nowadays, process‐aware information systems (PAISs) are widely used for the management of ‘administrative’ processes characterized by clear and well‐defined structures. Besides those scenarios, PAISs can be used also in mobile and pervasive scenarios, where process participants can be only equipped with smart devices, such as personal digital assistants. None of existing PAISs can be entirely deployed on smart devices, making unfeasible its usage in highly mobile scenarios. This paper presents ROME4EU, a mobile PAIS developed for being applied to the coordination of emergency operators, and an extensive validation of the system, both in term of performances and usability/acceptability by the users. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Supporting Effortless Coordination: 25 Years of Awareness Research

Significant progress has been made in awareness research in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work over the last 25 years. This survey addresses awareness and effortless coordination—that is, how a mutual understanding in distributed teams can be gained and maintained, while still keeping the team members’ coordination efforts to a minimum. I characterise the origins of awareness and its ethnographically-informed and the technology-oriented roots, and discuss the notion of awareness. I review technical solutions for awareness support—both in applications as seen by users, and in base technology as seen by developers. Design tensions in awareness research and solutions are identified. A discussion contrasts awareness as seen from a users’ activity and effort perspective versus awareness as seen from a systems’ support and automation perspective.     

The MAUI Toolkit: Groupware Widgets for Group Awareness

Group awareness is an important part of synchronous collaboration, and support for group awareness can greatly improve groupware usability. However, it is still difficult to build groupware that supports group awareness. To address this problem, we have developed the Multi-User Awareness UI toolkit (MAUI) toolkit, a Java toolkit with a broad suite of awareness-enhanced UI components. The toolkit contains both extensions of standard Swing widgets, and groupware-specific components such as telepointers. All components have added functionality for collecting, distributing, and visualizing group awareness information. The toolkit packages components as JavaBeans, allowing wide code reuse, easy integration with IDEs, and drag-and-drop creation of working group-aware interfaces. The toolkit provides the first ever set of UI widgets that are truly collaboration-aware, and provides them in a way that greatly simplifies the construction and testing of rich groupware interfaces.