Development of evaluation method for the quality of npp mcr operators' communication using work domain analysis (WDA)

Abstract

Evolution of work demands has changed industrial evolution to computerization which makes systems complex and complicated: this field is called Complex Socio-Technical Systems. As communication failure is one problem of Complex Socio-Technical Systems, it has been discovered that communication failure is the reason for many incidents and accidents in various industries, including the nuclear, aerospace and railway industries. Despite the fact that there have been many studies on the severity of communication failure, there is no evaluation method for operators’ communication quality in NPPs. Therefore, the objectives of this study are to develop an evaluation method for the quality of NPP Main Control Room (MCR) operators` communication and to apply the proposed method to operators in a full-scope simulator. In order to develop the proposed method, the Work Domain Analysis (WDA) method is introduced. Several characteristic of WDA, such as Abstraction Decomposition Space (ADS) and the diagonal of ADS are the key points in developing an evaluation method for the quality of NPP MCR operators’ communication. In addition, in order to apply the proposed method, nine teams working in NPPs participated in the field simulation. Evaluation results reveal that operators’ communication quality was higher as larger portion of components in the developed evaluation criteria were mentioned. Therefore, the proposed method could be a useful one for evaluating the communication quality in any complex system. In order to verify that the proposed method is meaningful to evaluate communication quality, the evaluation results were further investigated with objective performance measures. Further investigation of the evaluation results also supports the idea that the proposed method can be used in evaluating communication quality.