Digital Control Room Design Framework with Human Performance Considerations for SMR Deployments

Abstract

The research is aiming to develop an integrated framework to achieve new designs of digital control rooms (DCR) with multidimensional views and human factor considerations to support the safe deployments of Small Modular Reactor (SMR). The proposed integrated research framework included control room physical model, human factors analysis with interfaces to the control room system, and co-simulation to analyze plant operation for different scenarios. The proposed digital control room platform will support the evaluation of different digital control room design features for different operation scenarios and human factors. The impacts of digital control rooms on situational awareness are analyzed using the proposed digital control room setup, which supports decision-aiding systems in plant operation. Integrated human performance management system is described that includes human health monitoring and human performance semantic networks to accumulate human performance, operation performance, and the coupling with digital control room design features. Selected operation scenarios are modeled and used to evaluate human performance while mapping to control room design features. The proposed integrated digital control is demonstrated using co-simulation platform using IAEA SMR simulator and different operator interactions and scenarios within the digital control room are used to evaluate human performance and reflected to the plant operation performance using the proposed control room design.