Effects Of Mutual Awareness On Team Performancein Accident Diagnosis Under Computerized Working Environment

Large complicated process plants and critical safety systems, such as nuclearpower plant (NPP), are usually operated by an operation team rather than individualpersonal. Team has many advantages over single operator, such as effectiveness,efficiency, robustness and so on (Nonose et al.,2010).Situation Awareness (SA), whichis a dynamic mental representation and understanding of environmental information, isa key concept influencing decision making (Nonose et al.,2010). Many studies havebeen conducted about individual situation awareness, but with the increasing concernsfor team cooperation, Team Situation Awareness (TSA) becomes a new research topic.Mutual Awareness is part of team situation awareness, measuring understanding ofthe other people’s operations in other parts of the system. This study aims at exploringthe effects team mutual awareness has on team diagnosis task. NPP emergencydiagnosisis adopted as a representation of knowledge-based diagnosis tasks. AMutualAwareness Tool (MAT) was designed and presented on the NPP operation interfaces toimprove mutual awareness.According to the result of experiment conducted, mutual awareness tool has apositive effect in enhancing team mutual awareness, and further more, mutualawareness can aid in accident analysis. The result also shows that enhancing mutualawareness has nearly no side effect with personal operations, such as alarmconfirmation. Due the limited mental resources, rise in mutual awareness can lead to areduction in individual situation awareness.