Human factors evaluation in nuclear power plant control rooms using a mobile system to support collaborative observation Luiz Carlos Silva Junior a , Marcos Roberto da Silva Borges a , Paulo Victor Rodrigues Carvalho a, b, * a Graduate Program in Informatics-NCE&IM, Cidade Universitária, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil b Comissão Nacional de Energia Nuclear, Instituto de Engenharia Nuclear, Cidade Univerisitária, Ilha do Fundão, Rio de Janeiro, CEP 21945-970 Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil article info Article history: Received 1 September 2011 Received in revised form 3 November 2011 Accepted 12 November 2011 Keywords: Mobile computer system Collaborative observation Human factors engineering Human-system interface design abstract Nuclear industry has several regulations and guidelines for human factors engineering (HFE) that should be applied in modernization of existing ones and in construction of new power plants. Their aim is to ensure that human factors/ergonomics are applied during the design process, making the system more controllable, reliable and safe than it would be if human factors were not adequately incorporated. Time consuming and inadequate methods for data collection and analysis in complex settings are often described as a problem to apply human factors in the design of process control systems. To facilitate the use of human factors/ergonomics in the design, we developed a mobile computer system to support collaborative observation of work teams to be used in complex environments. In this paper, we argue that collaborative observation should be used in the work teams’ knowledge elicitation for human system interface design purposes, showing the advantages of the collaborative approach in comparison to other non-collaborative ones. We describe the development of a mobile support system for collabo- rative observation tested in the evaluation of human system interfaces of a nuclear power simulator crew when operating a digital human-system interface. The results indicated that the mobile system stimu- lates collaboration among observers and the organization of overall human-system interface evaluation. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Nuclear power appears as an option for low cost and sustainable electrical power source. There has been renewed interest in building new nuclear power plants (NPP) in many countries as shown by the International Atomic Energy Organization e IAEA data presented in Fig. 1 . Most of these reactors have more than 20 years of operation, as shown in Fig. 2, and their instrumentation and control (I&C) systems are now being modernized to use new digital technology. Therefore, several NPP vendors are in the process of submitting new I&C and Human System Interface (HSI) for design certification review by the regulatory authorities of many countries, and the Human Factors Engineering (HFE) program is an important requirement for design certification of new HSIs. The aim of HFE program is to insure that human system interfaces, procedures, and training effectively support NPP personnel tasks and foster safe and efficient generation of power (O’Hara and Brown, 2004). The HFE program encompasses a comprehensive set of HFE activities that include operating experience review; functional requirements analysis and function allocation; task analysis; staffing and quali- fications analysis; human reliability analysis; human-system interface design; procedure development; training program development; and a final, comprehensive, verification and valida- tion (V&V) program. The V&V is conducted with operators in plant simulators specific to the plant design that has been built. In these V&V process we need to understand operators’ interactions with the human-system interface that shape group work activities. Fig. 3 presents HFE key activities that should be considered in any HSI modernization program. To perform adequate validation of control room interface design a human-centered approach (HCA) has to be used to exploit the technical innovations for the optimum humaneartifact interac- tions, aiming at improving the appropriateness of the technological solutions (Hancock and Chignell, 1995). In HCA we have to under- stand human interactions in group work activities because they play a paramount role in problem solving and local decision- making processes, and give important clues to investigate the tacit knowledge that teams use during their work activity. Behind these interactions we can find important reasoning mechanisms * Corresponding author. Comissão Nacional de Energia Nuclear, Instituto de Engenharia Nuclear, Cidade Univerisitária, Ilha do Fundão, Rio de Janeiro, CEP 21945-970 Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil. Tel.: þ55 21 21733835. E-mail addresses: paulov@ien.gov.br, paulov@pq.cnpq.br (P.V.R. Carvalho). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Progress in Nuclear Energy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pnucene 0149-1970/$ e see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pnucene.2011.11.007 Progress in Nuclear Energy 55 (2012) 93e101