Research on the Computerized Symptom-Oriented Procedures of Nuclear Power Plants

The design of computerized procedure presentation for nuclear power plants

Operator situational awareness in Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) control rooms is quintessential in ensuring plant safe operation. Towards improving situational awareness, a novel framework of the EYE - Expert Supervisory System capable of visually monitoring human machine interfaces (HMI) in cyber physical system (CPS) is proposed with target application in NPP control room environment. EYE applied on HMI (EYE-on-HMI), conceptually offers an unique opportunity to reduce human-in-the-loop errors inherent in feedback control systems and improve overall safety. While assessing the feasibility of the proposed framework, we reflect on implementation challenges and review key enabling state-of-the-art technologies for EYE-on-HMI framework. EYE-on-HMI as a framework is envisioned to be portable to various industrial applications with prospective safety improvement to next generation of commercial applications with “driverless” operations.

The author discusses human factors engineering as applied to main nuclear power plant (NPP) control room design, including the design principles, control room layout, control and information equipment, environment conditions, communications system, etc. The main control room for a new 300 MW NPP will be modified and improved on the basis of the Qinshan 300 MW NPP design. >

Guidelines for computerized presentation of emergency operating procedures

In the Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) control room, the operators’ performance in emergencies is impacted by the need to monitor many indicators on the control room boards, the limited time to interact with dynamic events, and the incompleteness of the operator’s knowledge. Recent research has been directed toward increasing the level of automation in the NPP system by employing modern AI techniques that support the operator’s decisions. In previous work, the authors have employed a novel AI-guided declarative approach (namely, Answer Set Programming (ASP)) to represent and reason with human qualitative knowledge. This represented knowledge is structured to form a reasoning-based operator support system that assists the operator and compensates for any knowledge incompleteness by performing reasoning to diagnose failures and recommend executing actions in real time. A general ASP code structure has been proposed and tested against simple scenarios, e.g., diagnosis of pump failures that result in loss of flow transients and generating the needed plans for resolving the issue of stuck valves in the secondary loop. In this work, we investigate the potential of the previously proposed ASP structure by applying ASP to a realistic case study of the Three Mile Island, Unit 2 (TMI-2) accident event sequence (in particular, the first 142 minutes). The TMI scenario presents many challenges for a reasoning system, including a large number of variables, the complexity of the scenario, and the misleading readings. The capability of the ASP-based reasoning system is tested for diagnosis and recommending actions throughout the scenario. This paper is the first work to test and demonstrate the capability of an automated reasoning system by applying it to a realistic nuclear accident scenario, such as the TMI-2 accident.

Control room modernization is an important part of life extension for the existing light water reactor fleet. None of the 99 currently operating commercial nuclear power plants in the U.S. has completed a full-scale control room modernization to date. Nuclear power plant main control rooms for the existing commercial reactor fleet remain significantly analog, with only limited digital modernizations. Upgrades in the U.S. do not achieve the full potential of newer technologies that might otherwise enhance plant and operator performance. The goal of the control room upgrade benefits research is to identify previously overlooked benefits of modernization, identify candidate technologies that may facilitate such benefits, and demonstrate these technologies through human factors research. This report describes a pilot study to test upgrades to the Human Systems Simulation Laboratory at INL.

Ergonomic field studies in a nuclear power plant control room

AI-Guided Reasoning-Based Operator Support System for the Nuclear Power Plant Management

The shift from analog to digital Instruments (related mainly to information visualization) and Controls in Nuclear Power Plant Main Control Rooms (NPP MCR) is a central current topic of investigation. In NPP MCR, digitalization was implemented gradually, analog and digital systems still coexisting for the two main systems related to safety--Safety Instruments and Control System (SICS) and Process Instruments and Controls System (PICS). My ongoing research focuses on the introduction of Advanced Interaction Media (AIM) such as stereoscopic 3D visualization and multi-touch surfaces in control rooms. This paper proposes a Safety-Centric approach for gathering the Design Rationale needed in the specification of such novel AIM concepts as well as their evaluation through user tests. Beyond methodological research, the final output of the current research is to build an experimental simulator aiming to enhance improvements in Human-Systems Integration (HSI). This paper provides an overview of the topics under consideration.

Control room modernization will be an important part of life extension for the existing light water reactor fleet. As part of modernization efforts, personnel will need to gain a full understanding of how control room technologies affect performance of human operators. Recent advances in technology enables the use of eye tracking technology to continuously measure an operator’s eye movement, which correlates with a variety of human performance constructs such as situation awareness and workload. This report describes eye tracking metrics in the context of how they will be used in nuclear power plant control room simulator studies.

Computerized procedures (CPs) are recognized as an emerging alternative to paper-based procedures for supporting control room operators in nuclear power plants undergoing life extension and in the concept of operations for advanced reactor designs. CPs potentially reduce operator workload, yield increases in efficiency, and provide for greater resilience. Yet, CPs may also adversely impact human and plant performance if not designed and implemented properly. Therefore, it is important to ensure that existing guidance is sufficient to provide for proper implementation and monitoring of CPs. In this paper, human performance issues were identified based on a review of the behavioral science literature, research on computerized procedures in nuclear and other industries, and a review of industry experience with CPs. The review of human performance issues led to the identification of a number of technical gaps in available guidance sources. To address some of the gaps, we developed 13 supplemental guidelines to support design and safety. This paper presents these guidelines and the case for further research.

Research on intelligent monitor for 3D power distribution of reactor core

Stability and steady state analysis of control and safety systems of Nuclear Power Plants

Development of an EEG-based workload measurement method in nuclear power plants

This paper describes factors that cause the information complexity and how to measure the information complexity, and proposes solutions to design a human-machine interface to reduce the complexity of system information in nuclear power plants. The factors include nuclear power control system itself, an improper automation design, new technologies of fully digital instrumentation, control, and human-machine interface that has created tremendous functionality and the price of increased system complexity, and the ill-designed humancomputer user interface. The NASA-TLX and Task COMplexity (TACOM) were adopted to measure the information complexity of screen design and emergency procedure responses, respectively. An overview of the instrumentation and control system of the EPR (Evolutionary Power Reactor), an advanced pressurized-water reactor (PWR), is presented. Its information complexity is discussed and solutions are proposed according to the general principles of humanmachine interface design. We focus on two principles that direct the interface design for the EPR project. The first is to "provide information in a satisfactory manner" to the human operator. The second is to "provide adequate information" to the human operator. This paper is the preliminary report of part of the large multi-year project addressing information complexity problems and interface design in constructions of new nuclear power plants.