ABSTRACT
NUREG-0711 was developed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to provide human factors engineering (HFE) guidance for conducting safety reviews of the HFE design development process in the evaluation of new and modified Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) designs. NUREG-0711 indicates that applicants should assess workload (WL) and situation awareness (SA) during the Verification and Validation of the design using state-of-the-art metrics for WL and SA. The majority of the metrics for assessment of WL and SA were designed for domains other than the NPP domain. Consequently, these metrics may need to be modified in order to be suitable for use in the assessment of NPP designs. Given the large number and variety of metrics, a tool that assists reviewers in determining the appropriate use of a given metric, is needed. In order to accomplish this, characteristics of WL and SA metrics that are particularly important to the NPP domain were determined. Next, a literature review was completed to identify available metrics of these cognitive constructs. Several metrics most applicable to the domain were identified. Implications and future directions are discussed.
