Empirical research on an ecological interface design for improving situation awareness of operators in an advanced control room

The purpose of this study is to validate whether an ecological interface design (EID) improves operators’ situation awareness in an advanced control room of a nuclear power plant (NPP). EID is defined as an approach to interface design that was introduced specifically for complex socio-technical, real-time, and dynamic systems. The EID technology has not yet been adapted to the nuclear power industry due to lack of empirical studies. Especially in a situational awareness aspect, many researchers have predicted that the EID will support operators to detect unanticipated events. Just a few studies, however, unveiled the positive effect of the EID display on human performance using a full scoped simulator.In this study, to investigate whether an EID improves operators’ situational awareness, we developed an EID prototype for nuclear power operations and a partial scoped dynamic mockup to validate the effectiveness of the EID prototype. Three experienced operators were involved as subjects in our study and they were fully well trained for using the EID prototype. We compared two types of situations in terms of situation awareness. One is mimic based information display and the other is a mimic plus EID based information display. The result of our study revealed that a mimic plus EID based information display is more effective than a mimic based information display in terms of situation awareness. This study is significant in that the EID as an emerging technology is adoptable to a digitalized control room in an aspect of improving operators’ situation awareness.

► An EID prototype for monitoring primary side of nuclear power plant is proposed.
► The effectiveness of the prototype is validated using a partial scoped dynamic mockup in terms of situation awareness.
► The validation is based on comparison of a mimic display with an EID plus mimics.