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Author Amber Drinkwater, Steve Baker |
| Abstract As control systems in high-risk industries become increasingly automated, we see the human Control Room Operator’s role evolve from a high degree of reliance on human control, to a supervisory role of the control by automated systems. As automation increases, the role of the operator may change e.g., they may perform more monitoring activities and perform fewer control actions. This affects how humans interact with these systems, and what demand is placed on them versus the system; impacting the procedures, communications and expected team dynamics amongst other factors. The gathering, maintaining and purposefully utilising Situation Awareness (SA) in modern nuclear control room environments is important; however, it can be difficult for Human Factors (HF) practitioners to define and assess, particularly with increasing levels of automation. It may be inappropriate to expect the operator to know every low-level detail about the status of each system, but more important to expect awareness of higher-level information such as what the other team members are managing or understanding the procedural objectives. Many of the existing methods to assess SA for HF validation activities present limitations, and do not consider the changes in Situation Awareness requirements of the operator resulting from increased automation. This affects the ability to assess the degree to which operators can successfully gather, maintain and utilise SA. We will share some of our challenges and experiences of applying a multi-method approach to SA assessment during Integrated Systems Validation (ISV) of a highly automated main control room. |
