| This study proposes an idea of adaptive alarm interface,which is supposed to have good features of both alarm-tile interfaces that are typical in nuclear power plants(NPPs),and alarm-bar interfaces that use changing bars to indicate the current condition of a NPP and abnormalities.Depending on the situation of the moment in a NPP,the alarm management system will decide whether the alarm-tile interface or the alarm-bar interface will be shown to operators on the screen.To validate usability of an adaptive alarm interface,it was compared against an alarm-tile interface and an alarm-bar interface through lab experiments with forty-five participants.During periods with a low frequency alarms,this study found that understanding the parameter trending function of using the alarm-bar based design was optimized.This was why,during periods with a low frequency alarms,the detection time of the using the alarm-bar based design was significantly shorter than using the alarm-tile based design.On the other hand,during periods with a high frequency alarms,there were no significant differences on the detection time.During the periods with a high frequency alarms,however,using the alarm-tile based design was less likely to make the detection error.Also,the results from the subjective evaluation demonstrate that the adaptive alarm interface not only allows understanding of parameter trending,which is a distinguishing feature of the alarm-bar interface,but also contains the function of detection of alarms,which is the advantage of the alarm-tile interface.These finding would be grounds of using the adaptive alarm interface.However,the adaptive alarm interface needed improvement in the future.For example,the results from the subjective evaluation implied that the swapping alarm design might make the participants feel anxious.The situation awareness(SA)level of the adaptive alarm interface was insufficient compared to the alarm-tile and bar interfaces possibly due to distraction from interface swapping. |
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