Abstract
Many studies have showed the human errors were the major reason to cause of the accident. In fact, human errors may result in tangible or intangible cost loss and influence of system safety. Especially in nuclear power plant (NPP), serious human failure would damage to operation safety. Thus, no matter what the roles they are, such as operation or maintenance, each of the people in NPPs is played as a vital role. Previous studies indicate that about 30 to 50 percent accidents were result from human failure. Hence, the aim of this dissertation would design two early warning methods in control room and maintenance department. The proposed early warning methods in this study could decrease human error in both control room and maintenance environment.First of all, this study applied the concepts of the Shewhart control chart to design a pre-alarm system for NPP control room. Two pre-alarm types were designed to compare with the original system, and all participants were requested to monitor each simulated system under both normal and abnormal states. The tasks for the participants included shutting down the reactor, searching for procedures, monitoring system parameters and executing secondary tasks. In each trial, the task performance, mental workload and situation awareness (SA) of the participants were measured. Respecting to maintenance, currently, on-line maintenance for NPPs is performed quite often while the system is in operation. The limited maintenance time very often bring heavy mental workload to their engineers. Therefore, according to the factors affecting the mental workload, this dissertation would construct a predictive mental workload model while maintaining digital systems in NPP. Through predicting mental workload, the manager can organize the human resources for each daily task to sustain the appropriate mental workload as well as improve maintenance performance. Finally, to verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme, this dissertation further applies GMDH into IC packaging plant to develop a suitable pre-alarm system.The results indicated (1) that participants had lower mental workload, but equal SA, when monitoring the system with either type of pre-alarm designs, (2) that lower alarm frequency and higher secondary task performance were obtained with the pre-alarm design, (3) that the proposed model is expected to provide the supervisor a reference value of engineers’ mental workload and the prediction ability of the model was high. (4) GMDH can construct a reliable pre-alarm system to reduce operators’ visual fatigue and raise yield rate in IC packaging plant.