There Is More to Monitoring a Nuclear Power Plant than Meets the Eye

Abstract

A fundamental challenge in studying cognitive systems in context is how to move from the specific work setting studied to a more general understanding of distributed cognitive work and how to support it. We present a series of cognitive field studies that illustrate one response to this challenge. Our focus was on how nuclear power plant (NPP) operators monitor plant state during normal operating conditions. We studied operators at two NPPs with different control room interfaces. We identified strong consistencies with respect to factors that made monitoring difficult and the strategies that operators have developed to facilitate monitoring. We found that what makes monitoring difficult is not the need to identify subtle abnormal indications against a quiescent background, but rather the need to identify and pursue relevant findings against a noisy background. Operators devised proactive strategies to make important information more salient or reduce meaningless change, create new information, and off-load some cognitive processing onto the interface. These findings emphasize the active problem-solving nature of monitoring, and highlight the use of strategies for knowledge-driven monitoring and the proactive adaptation of the interface to support monitoring. Potential applications of this research include control room design for process control and alarm systems and user interfaces for complex systems.

Interruptions in the wild: portraying the handling of interruptions in manufacturing from a distributed cognition lens

“…This includes, among others, ship navigation (Hutchins 1995a), aviation (Hutchins 1995b), HCI (e.g. Hollan et al 2000;Perry 2003;Rogers and Ellis 1994), heart surgery teams (Hazlehurst et al 2007), medical informatics (Hazlehurst et al 2008), information visualisation (Liu et al 2008), nuclear power plant (Mumaw et al 2000), and technostress in the office (Sellberg and Susi 2014). However, DCog and its approach have been criticised; two posed forms of criticism regard the DCog view of the very nature of cognitive phenomena, and its utility as an analytic tool (Rogers 2012).…”

How do interruptions affect clinician performance in healthcare? Negotiating fidelity, control, and potential generalizability in the search for answers

“…There have been many treatments of this issue in aviation, process control, and air traffic control (Colom, Martinez-Molina, Shih, & Santacreu, 2010;Loukopoulos, Dismukes, & Barshi, 2009;Mumaw, Roth, Vicente, & Burns, 2000;Wickens, 2002). Over the last 10-15 years, concerns about some of the consequences of multiply-threaded work have emerged in the healthcare domain.…”

Supporting multiple cognitive processing styles using tailored support systems

“…For example during normal operation, operators are primarily engaged in active system monitoring behaviors to support disturbance detection, situation assessment, as well as response planning, selection, and implementation [1]. An operator's monitoring behavior during nominal conditions is complex, knowledge-driven, cognitively demanding, and can be characterized as more problem-solving and planning than passive vigilance activity [9]. Furthermore, during normal condition, operators serve a supporting role in maintenance and equipment testing and repairs.…”