Advanced control rooms and crew performance issues: implications for human reliability

Recent trends in advanced control room (ACR) design are considered with respect to their impact on human performance. It is concluded that the effects of advanced technology on human performance cannot be assumed to be positive. Conducting human reliability analyses for advanced plants is made difficult by limitations in the general knowledge about the role of human operators in ACRs, the effects of specific design characteristics on human performance, the lack of available databases, and the lack of available subject matter expertise. Thus, there is a heightened need to precisely and thoroughly document the process of human action identification, evaluation, and quantification. In the longer term, research is needed on the effects of advanced technology on human performance, including the assessment of industry experience on a world-wide basis. The development of models to better understand the cognitive underpinnings of human errors appears to be an especially promising path.<<ETX>>