Team-centered IDAC: Modeling and simulation of operating crew in complex systems – Part 1: Team model and fundamentals

Abstract

Operation of highly complex systems such as Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) generally require highly trained professional operating teams. Factors associated with teamwork, such as ineffective communication and coordination, can be important contributing factors to accidents and unsafe behavior. The impact of crew interactions on team effectiveness and, consequently, on the entire system, has not been fully and quantitatively explored in high-risk environments such as NPPs. Since a team is an interactive social system, team-specific issues must be studied and evaluated from a “team perspective”—based on team dynamics and processes. This paper is part of a two-papers series that presents a simulation-based Team Model for NPP control room operations. The current paper, Part 1, describes the theoretical fundaments of the model and details its elements. The accompanying paper describes the simulation aspects, and a full application of the method to a pipe break accident in a four- four-loop steam generator feedwater system. The proposed model is based on the IDAC (Information, Decision, and Action in Crew context) cognitive model framework. The resulting model, Team-centered IDAC (Tc-IDAC), examines the team activities “Collaborative information collection,” “Shared decision making,” and “Distributed action execution” through specific modules for Team Error Management. These modules include error detection, error indication and error correction, and team performance shaping factors.