Abstract
Because the nuclear power plant is a big-scale procedural operating system, operators in it have to operate according to standard operating procedures in order to reach the goal of safety and efficiency. However, the complexity of operating procedures may increase the operators’ mental workload, so this research is to realize the complexity of operating procedures and to find out the bottleneck of the procedure for the direction of future improvement. In this research, operation procedures are introduced briefly at first and then some mental workload measurement methods and software/program complexity measurement methods are collected. Next, the concepts of motion study are combined with job evaluation to develop a method to measure the complexity degree of processes. The process complexity measurement method is divided into three aspects, i.e. complexity of executing contents in one step, module complexity and whole process complexity. By the calculation with the method, one can get complexity values of each aspect and whole process complexity value to represent the complexity of the process. Emergency operation procedure 500.3 EOP-RC of the nuclear power plant in Taiwan is selected as an example to conduct the method. At last, the factors affecting process complexity are discussed and the future improvement directions are proposed for further research.