Putting Gonuke Into Practice: Considerations for Human Factors Evaluations

The Guideline for Operational Nuclear Usability and Knowledge Elicitation (GONUKE) framework was introduced in 2015 to support human factors evaluations needed for control room upgrades at nuclear power plants. NUREG-0711, the Human Factors Engineering Program Review Model, is used by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to review human factors activities associated with human-system interfaces at nuclear power plants, and GONUKE is anchored to the phases of development and design in NUREG-0711. This paper addresses five considerations to help users of GONUKE better apply the framework to evaluations for NUREG-0711 and beyond. These five considerations are: (1) GONUKE only specifies evaluation, not design; (2) GONUKE is a framework, not a method or process; (3) GONUKE goes beyond NUREG-0711 requirements; (4) GONUKE application shouldfollow a graded approach; (5) different evaluations are required fo r formative vs. summative phases.

Human-System Interface with Explanation of Actions for Autonomous Anti-UAV Systems

Research on explanation is currently of intense interest as documented in the DARPA 2021 investments reported by the USA Department of Defense. An emerging theme for explanation techniques research is their application to the improvement of human-system interfaces for autonomous anti-drone or C-UAV defense systems. In the present paper a novel proposal based on natural language processing technology concerning explanatory discourse using relations is briefly described. The proposal is based on the use of relations pertaining to the possible malicious actions of an intruding alien drone swarm and the defense decisions proposed by an autonomous anti-drone system. The aim of such an interface is to facilitate the supervision that a user must exercise on an autonomous defense system in order to minimize the risk of wrong mitigation actions and unnecessary spending of ammunition.

STUDY OF SYSTEM INTERFACES THROUGH THE NOTION OF COMPLEMENTARITY

Understanding emergence is an important goal of system thinking, as it can express both desirable and negative properties of products and systems. Emergence has also a special importance as it has a direct link to the performance of products and systems, and thus has a direct relationship with the quality of life and thus sustainability in our societies. Emergence and system thinking are closely related to engineering design methodologies. In our paper, we develop a more precise definition of emergence through the core principles of systems complementarity that are similarity, irreducibility and sophisticated relationships expressed through the interfaces between systems, subsystems or product components.We demonstrate the utility of the approach based on an aircraft pylon case study by presenting a detailed definition of an interface design matrix and analyse how pylon subsystems influence emergence. The results have shown that the product can be perfectly represented by a model-based approach supporting interface management and the assessment of system complementarity. In turn, this approach allows to go beyond a qualitative definition of emergence, as it proposes a quantitative approach through the assessment of complementarity.