Experimental Research on Measurement of Team Situation Awareness in Nuclear Power Plants

Abstract

Endsley (1995) systematically put forward the theory of Situation Awareness (SA). The theory emphasizes people’s perception and understanding of current operating environment information, and prediction of future state under certain time and space conditions. Endsley and Jones (2012) further proposed a SA-Oriented Design system. With the deepening of SA research, it has become the frontier of engineering psychology research. At present, Nuclear Power Plants (NPP) are highly computerized, the complexity of its main control room has increased, man-machine interaction is frequent, tasks are complex and changeable, time pressure is high, and cognitive load is heavy, so the workload of operators is greatly increased. In this complex technical system, the accuracy of Team Situation Awareness (TSA) of NPP is an important factor for high quality decision-making and efficient operation. If the problem of real-time and accurate SA measurement can be solved, it will be helpful to the design of Real-Time Adaptive man-machine interaction. Firstly, this paper analyses the elements and types of Team Situation Awareness of nuclear power plant, and develops a team SA measurement scale. Then, in different accident scenarios, the level of team SA of different types was measured by the simulation experiment, and the influencing factors were analyzed. These provide theoretical and experimental support for improving TSA of NPP.