Design and Evaluation of a Team Mutual Awareness Toolkit for Digital Interfaces of Nuclear Power Plant Context

ABSTRACT

In the teamwork of nuclear power plants (NPPs), the maintenance of mutual awareness enables the operators to have an up-to-the-moment understanding of each other’s work and makes the collaboration more efficient. Providing interface support for mutual awareness is proven to be an effective way to enhance the operators’ mutual awareness in digital systems. What mutual awareness-relevant information to provide and how to present the information on the display are two questions worth studying. This research focused on the above two questions and provided a newly designed mutual awareness toolkit on the context of digital interfaces in NPPs. The usability of the designed toolkit was evaluated through a laboratory experiment. The influence of the mutual awareness toolkit on team performance and its interaction effect with task complexity was further examined under incident scenarios. The results showed that the designed mutual awareness toolkit improved the operators’ mutual awareness, while it did not decrease their individual situation awareness (SA) or impose extra mental workloads. In team diagnosis tasks, the teams using the mutual awareness toolkit more thoroughly discussed the incident scenarios and identified more key points of the incidents. The diagnosis correctness, perhaps moderated by other factors besides mutual awareness, was not significantly improved.

Funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71371104) and the Open Funding Project of National Key Laboratory of Human Factors Engineering (Grant No. HF2012-K-02).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71371104) and the Open Funding Project of National Key Laboratory of Human Factors Engineering (Grant No. HF2012-K-02).

Notes on contributors

Manrong She

Manrong She is a PhD candidate at the Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University, within the Institutes of Human Factors and Ergonomics. She holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from Tsinghua University.

Zhizhong Li

Zhizhong Li is a full professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University. He received his PhD degree in Manufacturing Engineering and Automation from Tsinghua University in 1999. His current research areas include interface design, human error, system safety, and other ergonomics issues associated with complex industrial systems.