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An Improved Annunciation Strategy for CANDU Plants.
Abstract:
In large, complex process systems such as nuclear power plants, annunciation is intended to alert operations staff to important changes in plant conditions that may impact on operational goals. Annunciation, along with the routine monitoring of control room displays and field communication, should enable operations staff to keep up-to-date with the current plant conditions and predict future plant states for all phases of plant operation.
Over the past thirty years of nuclear plant operation, the understanding of the needs of operators within the system has improved and the available technology to support them has become more sophisticated. Even so, it is still common to find annunciation systems with deficiencies such as 'alarm flooding' during plant upsets, distracting alarms irrelevant to the operating situation, and alarms with cryptic messages. 1
The opportunity to improve nuclear plant annunciation has been well recognized world-wide for many years. In Canada, nuclear utilities and AECL have co-sponsored a research program to develop enhancements to the initial annunciation system designs. An improved strategy for CANDU annunciation has been developed incorporating concepts that significantly improve performance and are retrofitable to current plants and are being incorporated into new plant designs.
This paper reviews the development approaches taken, discusses the operational principles established to guide the development of annunciation improvements and assess their effectiveness, and describes the processing, presentation and interaction concepts of the improved CANDU annunciation strategy. The paper concludes by summarizing the current program status and plans to validate the effectiveness of these new annunciation concepts in operational settings.
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