Cognitive simulation of operators diagnostic strategies in nuclear power plants

Abstract

This paper describes an approach to simulate operators diagnostic strategies under emergency situation of nuclear power plants. To assess operators cognitive workload during the diagnosis, we have developed a diagnostic model, which is an embedded module of a task simulation analyzer, SACOM. This model is based on a blackboard architecture and uses four types of diagnostic agents. The diagnostic agents can simulate typical diagnostic strategies used by human operators: i.e., data-driven search, symptomatic search, hypothesis-driven search, and topographic search. The model is developed using a G2 expert system tool.