Development of an EEG-based workload measurement method in nuclear power plants

Abstract

The environment of main control rooms of large scale process control systems such as nuclear power plants (NPPs) has been changed from the conventional analog type to the digital type. In digitalized advanced main control rooms, human operators conduct highly cognitive work rather than physical work compared to the case of the original control rooms in NPPs. Various operating support systems (OSSs) have been developed to reduce an operator's workload. Most representative techniques to evaluate the workload are based on subjective ratings. However, there are some limitations including the possibility of skewed results due to self-assessment of the worldoad and the impossibility of continuously measuring the workload due to freezing simulation for workload assessment. As opposed to subjective ratings techniques, physiological techniques can be used for objective and continuous measurements of a human operator's mental status by sensing the physiological changes of the autonomic or central nervous system. In this study, electroencephalogram (EEG) was used to measure the operator's mental workload because it had been proven to be sensitive to variations of mental workload in other studies, and it allows various types of analysis. Based on various research reviews on the characteristics of brainwaves, EEG based Workload Index (EWI) was suggested and validated through experiments. As a result, EWI is concluded to be valid for measuring an operator's mental workload and preferable to subjective techniques. Furthermore, EWI was applied to evaluate the effects of OSSs on human operators through experiments. Finally, it is expected that the results of this study can be used to measure the operator's workload in NPPs. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.