Adapting Situational Awareness Measures for Hydropower Display Evaluations

This study used Situation Awareness (SA) as a measure to evaluate two new functional displays supplementing existing monitor displays in a large hydropower system control room. Because it was impractical to use traditional SA measures this paper proposes a novel SA measurement framework, in which controllers' SA levels are derived from their in-the-loop utterance and viewing patterns, their context-specific reports of the situations, and their overall SA reflections. Results indicate that the SA measures not only support and complement one another, but also are consistent with performance results. This study offers a novel approach of using convergent lines of evidence to assess SA in the situations that involve a whole control room or command centre or in situations constrained by time and resources.