Approaches to performance based evaluations of control rooms in the nuclear domain

Abstract

The research program on integrated system validation contains the analysis of the state of the art on relevant research and development projects on performance-based evaluation in upgraded and computer-based control rooms in nuclear power plants. The report analyzes practical cases (referred as case studies) to provide an overview of the methodological approaches in real application of human factors engineering in the evaluation of main control rooms of commercial nuclear power plants. The review includes empirical studies and mainly practical industry experience. The basic literature for the review proceeded from public available documentation, such as technical conferences’ proceedings and articles from scientific journals, taking into account the confidentiality of the reporting of industrial case studies on integrated system validation (implementation plans and results reports). The case studies were analyzed with regard to twelve characteristics: study reference, domain of origin, type of study, purpose of the study, theoretical underpinning, issues of integrated system validation, validation stages, methods and measures, main results and conclusions, recommendations, further research, and references. The state of the art report may be useful for researchers, developers, utilities, vendors, and designers of high reliability industries, who are planning to go through modernization processes or developing new control rooms, and have to test or evaluate them from a human factors’ perspective.