Comparisons of human reliability data between analog and digital environments

Abstract

It is obvious that the management of operational risk for nuclear power plants (NPPs) is critical for their sustainability. In this regard, it should be stressed that the establishment of digital main control rooms (MCRs) in NPPs is gradually increasing these days, which are distinguished from analog MCRs equipped with conventional devices. Since the operational conditions of human operators working in digital MCRs are entirely different from those of analog MCRs, human reliability data should be clarified from the viewpoint of the raw data to be included in the related probabilistic safety assessment (PSA). In this study, two sets of human reliability data collected from both analog and digital MCRs were compared with respect to 21 basic task types that are observable during the performance of proceduralized tasks (e.g., emergency operating procedures). As a result, it seems that human error probabilities (HEPs) of the digital MCR are lower than those of the analog MCR overall. However, since certain digital MCR HEPs are higher for several particular task types, uncertainty in PSA could be enlarged if human reliability data secured from an analog MCR are directly used to conduct the PSA of a digital MCR. This paper is an extended version of the paper submitted to the ESREL 2020-PSAM15 conference.