Overview

It is essential for a nuclear power plant, that it can be operated safely and efficiently from the control room in all operational states and accident conditions. The control room provides the control room staff with the human-machine interfaces and related information and equipment (for instance the communication interface) which are necessary for the achievement of the plant operational goals. In addition, it provides an environment under which the control room staff are able to perform their tasks without discomfort, excessive stress, or physical hazard. This standard contains requirements for the human-machine interface in the main control rooms of nuclear power plants. It also contains requirements for the selection of functions, design consideration and organization of the human-machine interface and procedures which shall be used systematically to verify and validate the functional design. These requirements reflect the human factors engineering principles as they shall be applied to the human-machine interface during normal and abnormal plant conditions. The primary purpose of the standard is to provide functional design requirements to be used in the design of the main control room of a nuclear power plant to meet operational and safety requirements. The standard also provides functional interface requirements which relate to control room staffing, operating procedures and the training programme which are, together with the human-machine interface, constituents of the control room system. The standard does not cover special purpose or normally unattended control points, such as those provided for shutdown operations from outside the main control room or for radioactive waste handling, or emergency response facilities (see draft standard E DIN IEC 60965 (VDE 0491-5-5):2010-03). Detailed equipment design is outside the scope of this standard. The standard is intended for application to new control rooms whose conceptual design is initiated after the publication of this standard. The requirements and recommendations of this standard may be used for refits, upgrades and modifications of existing facilities. The responsible Committee is Subcommittee UK 967.1 "Leittechnik für kerntechnische Anlagen" ("Instrumentation for nuclear facilities") of the DKE (German Commission for Electrical, Electronic and Information Technologies) at DIN and VDE.