The Impact of Simulation Display on Nuclear Power Plant Task Error Frequencies

This research investigated the impact physical fidelity has on error frequencies when operating a simulated nuclear power plant (NPP) main control room (MCR). The simulated environment used in this study uses dual 24". monitors and a mouse as its interface, which represents the interface of digital power plants planned to come online. The simulator models an NPP MCR using scroll/pan/zoom (SPZ) to navigate Instrumentation and Control (I&C) panels housed along MCR walls. However, touchscreens can be used to display entire I&C panels, which represents the legacy plants in use today and requires participants to stand to operate in the MCR. A between-subjects experiment was conducted to evaluate desktop and touchscreen interfaces for their impact on response times and error rates when performing reactor operator (RO) tasks. While increased physical fidelity through larger field of view did help reduce response times, using touch induced more miss touch errors than the mouse.