Effects of integrated designs of alarm and process information on diagnosis performance in digital nuclear power plants

AbstractIn the main control rooms of nuclear power plants (NPPs), operators frequently switch between alarm displays and system-information displays to incorporate information from different screens. In this study, we investigated two integrated designs of alarm and process information – integrating alarm information into process displays (denoted as Alarm2Process integration) and integrating process information into alarm displays (denoted as Process2Alarm integration). To analyse the effects of the two integration approaches and time pressure on the diagnosis performance, a laboratory experiment was conducted with ninety-six students. The results show that compared with the non-integrated case, Process2Alarm integration yields better diagnosis performance in terms of diagnosis accuracy, time required to generate correct hypothesis and completion time. In contrast, the Alarm2Process integration leads to higher levels of workload, with no improvement in diagnosis performance. The diagnosis performance of ...