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Annunciation Improvements
Assessment Approaches and Lessons Learned.
Abstract:
AECL, in partnership with Canadian CANDU utilities, has implemented a program to improve the design of annunciation systems. Several innovations were developed, prototyped, and evaluated resulting in considerable interest from several CANDU stations. The need to assess and demonstrate the operational potential of these annunciation improvements has led to the use of several approaches to evaluating and assessing usability and performance. Also, the scarcity of subjects and facilities for testing has led to the development of cost-effective approaches.
This paper discusses approaches used for both formal and informal assessments of the usability and effectiveness of the proposed annunciation system improvements. The paper also discusses the lessons learned from applying the different approaches. Three types of evaluation approaches are presented:
• subject observation - using audio-video recordings to create both the simulation and context of an event to assess the users performance when observing a re-creation (once removed) rather than being immersed in the actual task,
• partial subject interaction - a partial interface prototype in conjunction with audio-video scenario replay to provide context (dynamic non-interactive part-task),
• part-task - a recreation, in real-time, of a part of the system (dynamic interactive part-task), and
• full interaction (immersion) - a modified full-scope simulator to include various configurations of the new concepts (full dynamic interactive).
Finally, the paper presents an approach to a phased implementation of these proposed changes to annunciation.
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