The design tasks of this particular project were a bit unusual. The contracting utility had already built the reactor and the buildings to house the control room. The control room designers, therefore, had to design a control room for an already existing plant, with consideration of the sensors and actuators that were present. Functional
information, however, was largely lacking. For example, it would be known from plant drawings that a certain feedwater stream had x number of valves of which some
were manually controllable. Functionally, however, it would not be known what purpose that feedwater stream served. In many cases, engineers had to infer design purposes from the drawings. For the most part, the plant was `wired already, meaning that sensors and their signals already existed. In particular, the level of automation of plant systems was pre-determined. In addition, the control room itself had to "t within the existing space allotted for the control room, with walls, doors, and basic wiring in fixed locations.
A participant-observer study of ergonomics in engineering design:
how constraints drive design process
Catherine M. Burns*,1, Kim J. Vicente
Cognitive Engineering Laboratory, Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, Canada
www.elsevier.com
