Study on dynamic evolution of operators’ behavior in digital nuclear power plant main control room – Part I: Qualitative analysis

Abstract

Digitalization is a trend in large-scale complex systems such as nuclear power plants (NPPs). It changes the way main control room (MCR) operators interact with systems. Many studies shows that the adoption of digital technology has brought some new risks for MCR operators, and whether the reliability of these technologies can meet safety and economic requirements has become one of the urgent problems that NPPs must solve. The study consists of two parts. In Part I, we investigated the dynamic evolution of operators’ four behaviors: monitoring and detection (MD), situation assessment (SA), response planning (RP), and response implementation (RI). This paper incorporates Boolean network (BN) analysis into the field of human reliability analysis (HRA), by applying semi-tensor product of matrix (STP), whereby the dynamics evolution of operators’ behavior can be expressed in an algebraic form. Utilizing this algebraic representation, a BN analysis model is proposed, on which we based a qualitative analysis. An illustrative example is given to show how to construct the BN model via experimental data. We also discuss the advantage of the proposed methodology, its feasibility and highlighting the future work remaining.