Development of a team workload assessment technique for the main control room of advanced nuclear power plants

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Development of a team workload assessment technique for the main control room of advanced nuclear power plants

Lin, Chiuhsiang-Joe / Hsieh, Tsung-Ling / Tsai, Ping-Jung / Yang, Chih-Wei / Yenn, Tzu-Chung

For a main control room (MCR) in advanced nuclear power plants (ANPPs), a team of three operators has been adopted to enhance the safety of all the operating conditions, including general, abnormal, and emergent. Therefore, to evaluate the workload of team operators in the MCR of NPPs would be one valuable issues in human factor engineering (HFE) research. The NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) has been selected to measure the workload of operators in past studies. Some studies, however, indicated that the workload measured by the NASA-TLX did not have significant correlation with team performance. That is, assessing team workload using NASA-TLX alone may be a problem, and its sensitivity needs to be verified. In this study, a measurement called Team Workload Assessment (TWA) was developed to evaluate the team workload by characteristics of teamwork. The important characteristics of teamwork, including coordination, communication, support and leadership, and time sharing were developed in the questionnaire. Confirmatory factor analysis and Cronbach's alpha coefficient were used to examine the validity and reliability of the questionnaire. Finally, the team workload scores of the TWA were compared with the team workload scores of the NASA-TLX and the task performance was obtained from an experiment designed to verify the suitability of the TWA. As a result, it was found that the team workload scores of the TWA are more sensitive to task performance than are those of the NASA-TLX. Therefore, the TWA is available to measure the team workload in the MCR of NPPs.