Mutual Awareness, which measures understanding of the behaviors and status of other members in a team is supposed to influence team decision-making process in safety-critical tasks/systems. This study aims to explore enhancement of mutual awareness by adding a Mutual Awareness Tool (MAT) on a user interface and examining its effects on team diagnosis performance in emergency situations of a simulated nuclear power plant system. According to the experimental results, the embedded MAT on the operation interface enhanced team mutual awareness significantly, and improved incident diagnosis performance. The results also showed that the increase in mutual awareness led to a reduction of individual situation awareness, possibly due to the limited mental resources.

Properly designed alarm systems can benefit operators in conducting routine and emergency tasks. With the digitization of main control rooms, the alarm interface can be designed in various ways that are different from the traditional "alarm tile" style. An innovative alarm bar interface is proposed in this paper. A preliminary lab experiment was conducted to compare the traditional alarm tile and the new alarm bar interfaces. Sixteen university students were recruited to participate in the experiment, in which two emergency scenarios, Loss of Coolant Accident and Steam Generator Tube Rupture, were tested. The experiment task included two parts: alarm detection and identification. The subjective ratings supported the innovative alarm bar design for better parameter trend perception. The objective performance measures showed that the simpler design of the alarm tile interface better aided the alarm detection performance, whereas the alarm bar interface had almost the same alarm identification performance as the alarm tile interface.Relevance to industry: An alarm system is critical for a complex industrial system. The experimental results show that design evaluation is more complex than it may seem. Although it has not been proved to be overwhelmingly superior to the tile design, the alarm bar design shows promise for aiding operators and needs to be further validated. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Human factors research is highly demanded for the new generation nuclear power plants (NPPs) where digital technology is fully employed. The introduction of digital technology not only replaces the traditional analog displays and controls, but also greatly changes the job design and working manner. Considering the high cost of full-scope simulators, an economic and flexible simulated monitoring and control system of a NPP would be a helpful experiment platform for preliminary human factors studies. This study is aimed at constructing a simulated main control room (MCR) information display system. Commercial NPP physics simulation software, PCTran™, was adopted as a virtual power generating system, in which system statuses are "measured" and to which control operations are fed. An interface was developed to receive data from PCTran™ so that they can be displayed onto large scale displays or operator monitors. The display interfaces for both nuclear island and conventional island were designed following human factors guidelines. A multi-level alarm system was also developed. Experts from both nuclear engineering and human factors engineering were invited to evaluate the developed experiment platform system. The platform system is expected to provide support for various human factors studies ranging from interface validation to team behavior observation. Copyright © (2012) by IAPSAM & ESRA.