The Impact Of Complexity Of Interface Management Tasks And Time Pressure On The Operators’ Performance In Digital Nuclear Power Plant

With the rapid development of computer and control technology,the application of digital control technology in large complex man-machine-environment system is becoming more and more popular.Many new and under-construction main control room of nuclear power plant have applied digital control technology.The digitization of the main control room in nuclear power plant makes the operator changed their way of performing tasks,operators have changed their role in the total system from the manual controllers to the supervisor of automated system.At the same time,the digitalization of the main control room in nuclear power plant makes the operator must perform interface management task before completing the main monitoring tasks.Interface management tasks become the barrier between operator and important information.The abnormal conditions of power plant,the accuracy and timeliness of operator to perform procedures would have a direct impact on the safety of the power plant.Therefore,exploring the influence of complexity of interface management task and time pressure on the operators’ performance has great significance.This paper has reviewed in the main control room of nuclear power plant 、 Interface management tasks and task complexity,Through on-the-spot investigation,interview to operator in nuclear power plants,Combined with the research team developed nuclear power plant simulation platform,simulation experiments of nuclear power plant accident conditions were conducted on the simulation platform,to research the complexity of interface management task and time pressure effects on operator work performance.The complexity of the interface management tasks is characterized by the number of interface management tasks performed for the main monitoring tasks,the evaluation indexes of operators’ performance are constituted by the average execution time for completing each monitoring task and the error rate of monitoring task.To study the impact of complexity of interface management tasks and time pressure level on the operators’ performance in the digital nuclear power plant main control room.The results show that the time pressure has a significant effect on the average execution time.Interface management task complexity on operator has significant effect on the average execution time for operator in different time pressure level,but there is no significant difference on the error rare for the monitoring task that need to perform different complexity of interface management tasks.Studies have shown that interface management tasks have increased operators’ workload to a largeextent,the higher complexity of the interface management task is,the longer average execution time to complete the monitoring task is.Especially on the low time pressure level,the increasing of interface management tasks complexity has obstructed the complete of main monitoring task greatly,even interrupted the execution of the task because of having choose the wrong path or the incorrect configuration.But the increasing of complexity of interface management task does not necessarily lead to the wrong target location or make the incorrect judgment for controlling device of the nuclear power plant.That is,there is no inevitable connection between the error rate of those main monitoring tasks and the complexity of the interface management tasks that need to be performed.Also found,the complexity of the interface management tasks and time pressure have significantly impact on the average execution time.