Effects of Information Organization and Presentation on Human Performance in Simulated Main Control Room Procedure Tasks

摘要

The organization and presentation of information are critical in designing a display for industrial safety-critical systems. How they affect human performance is not fully studied yet. Functional displays are newly proposed for nuclear power plant (NPP) main control rooms. The effect of functional organization and the choice of information presentation styles need to be examined. This study aims to explore the effects of information organization (process display vs. functional display), parameter presentation (text vs. bar chart), and component presentation (mimic vs. simplified graph) for better understanding the pros and cons of functional displays designed following function based task analysis (FBTA). Performance data were collected from simulated procedure tasks using eight (2 x 2 x 2) displays. The results indicate that the functional display based on FBTA was more effective than the process display, and this could be mainly attributed to its functional information organization rather than to its presentation styles of parameters and components.