Development of the step complexity measure for emergency operating procedures using entropy concepts

For a nuclear power plant (NPP), symptom-based emergency operating procedures (EOPs) have been adopted to enhance the safety of NPPs through reduction of operators' workload under emergency conditions. Symptom-based EOPs, however, could place a workload on operators because they have to not only identify related symptoms, but also understand the context of steps that should be carried out. Therefore, many qualitative checklists are suggested to ensure the appropriateness of steps included in EOPs. However, since these qualitative evaluations have some drawbacks, a quantitative measure that can roughly estimate the complexity of EOP steps is imperative to compensate for them. In this paper, a method to evaluate the complexity of an EOP step is developed based on entropy measures that have been used in software engineering. Based on these, step complexity (SC) measure that can evaluate SC from various viewpoints (such as the amount of information/operators' actions included in each EOP step, and the logic structure of each EOP step) was developed. To verify the suitableness of the SC measure, estimated SC values are compared with subjective task load scores obtained from the NASA-TLX (task load index) method and step performance time obtained from a full scope simulator. From these comparisons, it was observed that estimated SC values generally agree with the NASA-TLX scores and step performance time data. Thus, it could be concluded that the developed SC measure would be considered for evaluating SC of an EOP step. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.