(A) study on mobile PC display design in NPP maintenance considering the level of expertise

Abstract

Recently, the importance of effective maintenance in nuclear power plants (NPPs) has been emphasized and research into effective maintenance by adopting mobile maintenance aids (MMAs) have been attempted. MMAs are currently used during operation and maintenance in NPPs, but no method that considers the limitations of mobile devices has been proposed. For improved and effective use, an MMA display design method based on abstraction hierarchy (AH) is proposed and its design considerations are discussed in this study. Six levels of abstraction hierarchy are proposed in this paper to classify the maintenance information. By classifying and organizing maintenance information using AH, maintenance information can be used effectively by users either high or low levels of expertise. When information classification has been finished, the information requirements and relationships for MMA design is extracted from the analysis of the AH result. Representative human-machine interface (HMI) guidelines issued by the US NRC, which are generally used in NPPs, are applied. With the considerations of MMA design analysis and practical guidelines, AH-based MMA is designed for maintenance tasks. An experiment is conducted using the AH-based MMA in order to estimate the effectiveness of the proposed method for maintenance tasks and to identify design considerations to enhance the proposed MMAs. The result indicated that an AH-based manual was more effective than a conventional manual in terms of task completion time and number of errors. The workload for the AH-based manual was estimated to be less than the conventional manual for low levels of expertise. However, a conventional manual was more comprehensive than the proposed manual and the steps contained in the maintenance manual were easier to remember. As the level of expertise increases, subjects tended to follow more abstract information while the number of navigations decreased. It is believed that when mobile device...