Effects of Automation for Emergency Operating Procedures on Human Performance in a Nuclear Power Plant

The digitization of the control systems in the main control room of a nuclear power plant has changed the operators’ role in coping with accidents and has thus brought about new human factor problems. This article focuses on the procedures that are used for guiding the emergency operating procedures in a nuclear power plant, and experimentally investigates the effects of the digitization of procedures on operators’ mental workload and situation awareness. In these experiments, the procedures at three different levels of automation, namely, paper-based procedures (PBPs), electronic procedures (EPs), and computer-based procedures (CBPs), are used as the independent variables. According to the experimental results, using these procedures at a high level of automation enables the operator to exhibit favorable operational performance with a decreased mental workload; however, the operator’s situation awareness (SA) is decreased. The research results presented here can provide a reference level for optimally setting the level of automation of the emergency operating procedures in a nuclear power plant and provide support for the optimization of a corresponding HRA (Human Reliability Analysis) model.