Validation of an Adaptive Alarm Interface Design for Digital Control Panels

摘要

This study proposes an adaptive alarm interface, which is supposed to have the good features of both alarm-tile interfaces that are typical in nuclear power plants (NPPs), and alarm-bar interfaces that use changing bars to indicate the current condition of an NPP and its abnormalities. Depending on the situation, the alarm management system will decide whether the alarm-tile or the alarm-bar interface should be presented to operators. To validate the usability of the adaptive alarm interface, it was compared against both the alarm-tile and alarm-bar interfaces through laboratory experiments with 45 participants. The results demonstrated that the adaptive alarm interface not only allowed the understanding of parameter trending, which was a distinguishing feature of the alarm-bar interface, but also improved the alarm detection, which was one advantage of the alarm-tile interface. However, the situation awareness level of the adaptive alarm interface was insufficient compared to the alarm-tile and bar interfaces possibly due to distraction from interface swapping.