New Approaches to Alarm Annunciation for CANDU Power Plants

Abstract

CANDU nuclear power plants have a number of relatively advanced alarm annunciation and display features compared to other plants of the 1970's and 1980's. However, alarm overload remains as a significant burden on the operator under some circumstances. Recent dialogue between AECL and CANDU utilities has produced new insights into the nature of the problem and into methods for resolving it. The solutions are multi-faceted, and involve a shift in approach in a number of areas including: staffing of the man/machine interface design teams, structuring of the design process, choice of presentation frameworks and programming languages, alarm categorization strategies, and display ergonomics.