The plant panel: Feasibility study of an interactive large screen concept for process monitoring and operation

Control room modernization projects worldwide are currently replacing or supplementing traditional wall-sized "boards" with computerized solutions. These solutions typically consist of multiple small screens that the operators need to navigate and arrange. Shared overview displays have been introduced to compensate for some of their perceived shortcomings, such as increased workload and a loss of process overview. This paper presents a study that investigates the feasibility of taking this approach a step further. Could we utilize modern screen technology to improve operator performance by introducing what we have called a "Plant Panel": a single, all-purpose, wall-sized, interactive display that shows the whole nuclear process in a coherent manner, blending detailed component and system information with useful plant overview information? To address this question we developed a prototype of the Plant Panel limited to the reactor-side of a Boiling Water Reactor and tested it with a number of potential users. This prototype is a 1.5 × 4 meter paper mock-up of the Plant Panel with an overlay of digitally projected interface elements. This study indicates that the Plant Panel concept may have several strengths compared to current computerized control room designs. The results of the feasibility tests show that features of the design related to supporting collaboration and process overview seem particularly promising. The main feasibility concern was related to how users could potentially lose their overview when positioned too close to the display. We recommend that further work should address this issue particularly, as well as exploring the areas for improvements that users identified.