Control Room Monitoring of Process Conditions and Identification of Improvements to Darlington Monitoring Displays

Abstract

In supervising CANDU plant operation, Operations staff must routinely monitor plant status using information from several information systems. One key source of plant status information are the CRT displays at console workstations and panel locations. At Darlington, as at most CANDU plants, Operations staff have adopted a reference set of displays for use in monitoring during Full Power Steady State conditions. The display set employed was chosen from the available suite of displays, and operational experience has demonstrated that the current displays could be improved. For Outages, no reference display set has been defined, and for Upset conditions, the current Transient display set does not provide the information needed by operations staff, and consequently is not used. This paper describes the basis for and findings from a COG project [1] undertaken in 1997 to characterize monitoring practice and develop improvements to control room displays to better support operator monitoring tasks for three key operating states.