Monitoring, assessment, decision support and action takes place continuously in the control room and good situational awareness is essential for these activities. The way information is presented tends to encourage reactive behaviour from control room operations as opposed to proactive system management.

This project will involve a review of the NESO’s current control room methods to evaluate for visualisation alternatives. From this there will be a recommendation of guidelines and designs which will have the potential to optimise both visual comprehension and decision-making in the control room.

Control room engineers will evaluate the visualisations to test against current practices and determine whether the alternatives would increase situational awareness and decision-making.

Benefits

There are several expected benefits, which include:

• Significant improvement in speed and accuracy of situational awareness and decision-making in the control room, leading to a reduction in human errors due to consistency in approach.
• Facilitation of pro-active decision-making and action, optimising system security and reducing operating costs.
• Long-term potential to reduce training costs by having a clearer interface.
• Quantitative evaluation of control room decision scenarios by using standard accuracy and time-to-completion measures and recording of qualitative feedback