RE-ENVISIONING THE OPERATOR CONSOLE FOR DHRUVACONTROL ROOM

S. Gaur, P. Sridharan, P. M. Nair,M.P. Diwakar, N. Gohel, C. K.PithawaBARC, Mumbai, India

AbstractControl Room design is undergoing rapid changes with

the progressive adoption of computerization and Automa-tion. Advances in man-machine interfaces have further ac-celerated this trend. This paper presents the design andmain features of Operator consoles (OC) for Dhruva con-trol room developed using new technologies. The OCshave been designed so as not to burden the operator withinformation overload but to help him quickly assess thesituation and timely take appropriate steps. The consolesprovide minimalistic yet intuitive interfaces, context sensi-tive navigation, display of important information and pro-gressive disclosure of situation based information. The useof animations, 3D graphics, and real time trends with thebenefit of hardware acceleration to provide a resolution-independent rich user experience. The use of XAML, anXML based Mark-up Language for User Interface defini-tion and C# for application logic resulted in complete sep-aration of visual design, content, and logic. This also re-sulted in a workflow where separate teams could work onthe UI and the logic of an application. The introductionof Model View View-Model has led to more testable andmaintainable software.

INTRODUCTIONWith years of Dhruva reactor operation, a need for up

gradation of some of the instrumentation was felt in thedata acquisition and processing systems, due to either ob-solescence or for augmenting the facilities provided by theexisting systems. Hence, taking due care of the retrofittingproblems, some PC based systems have been implementedand others are being implemented in Dhruva. The OperatorConsoles for these systems in Dhruva Control room havebeen upgraded with the latest UI design trends and tech-nologies and created intuitive and flexible UX models. Thecomputer based user interfaces with consistent and largescreen overview displays have been introduced which hasreplaced the existing recorder-based displays.

DHRUVA OPERATOR CONSOLESThe Operator Consoles has been developed for contin-

uous monitoring of nuclear, process parameters, radiationparameters and relevant status signals of Rector Trip LogicSystem, Alarm Annunciation System, Emergency CoreCooling System and Start-up Logic System. The OCs ac-quire the data from the corresponding embedded systemsvia dual redundant Ethernet links. The primary function ofOCs is data reception, storage and display in various for-mats.

They provide:• Multiple views of plant state for quick assessment of

situation.• Alarm Visualization(Analysing, organizing, filtering,

viewing alarms)• Archival of Periodic Data, Alarms, Diagnostics with a

data life cycle of 5 years.• Logging and reporting with data export to Excel.• Real-time and historical data trending.

DESIGN APPROACHThe OC has been designed keeping in mind the common

requirements across systems of similar categories while al-lowing the UI to be tailored to specific requirements ofthe system. This has resulted in a common OC plat-form. Variability between these applications were anal-ysed and addressed through configuration points. A flex-ible XML schema was designed to describe configurationinformation related to UI. Windows Presentation Founda-tion (WPF) helped in separating design and code, and pro-vided comprehensive binding framework, command infras-tructure, specialized layout builders for flexible UI cre-ation. Loose coupling of the View from the supportinglogic and data (Model) was achieved through the Model-View-View Model (MVVM) pattern. Asynchronous invo-cation, thread pooling and object pooling resulted in effi-cient use of multi-core hardware to achieve the requiredperformance. Use of lightweight embedded relational stor-age engine resulted in high performance concurrent storageand retrieval system.

The design of UI was mainly focused to achieve visu-ally appealing, feature oriented, intuitive, and less clutteredgraphical user interface. The rest of the paper describes theUI concepts that were used for building the user interfaceof Operator Consoles.

Separation of ConcernsModel-View-ViewModel (MVVM), a design pattern for

UI development consists of three conceptual parts - Model,View and ViewModel. The Model is the data, completelyUI independent that stores the state and does the process-ing. The View consists of visual elements. The ViewModelis an abstraction of the view, but it also provides a special-ization of the Model that the View uses for data-binding.This resulted in complete separation between visual design,content, and logic. The separation of concerns enabled UIUnit-testing, designer-developer workflow and decoupling.The layers could be developed and changed independentlyof one another, resulting in parallel development. View-Model classes are easy to unit-test since they have no spe-cific dependencies on visual elements.

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Figure 1: Alarm Windows for RTLS.

ConfigurabilityThe data model for plant data acquisition systems was

captured using XML technologies such as XML schemaand XPath. With its flexible tree-like data structure frame-work, XML provides more natural alternative for knowl-edge representation as compared to traditional databases.XML schema with its strong type sensitivity and capabil-ity to define new complex types allowed capturing the datamodel accurately. Structured hierarchal in-memory rep-resentation of XML data and use of Language OrientedQuery technology (LINQ) resulted in a declarative, queryprocessing.

Modernization of User InterfaceThe Operator Console is built around the minimal inter-

face principle such that it contains only features that areabsolutely necessary for users to complete the activity theapplication is meant to support; supports the user’s men-tal model of what it does. It contains uniformly designedinterface elements, but leverages on irregularity to createmeaning and importance.

Info GraphicsVisual metaphors have been provided to traditional and

familiar objects to make the interface more intuitive. TheOCs use monochromatic icons and simple solid colours forits new interface. The alarm windows from the Alarm An-nunciation System that consists of alarms for the particularOC are represented in the same format and colour defini-tions as its available to the operators in the Control Room(see Fig. 1).

Laser FocusLaser focussed interfaces helped to put visual focus on

the most important details. The most valuable informationlike current alarms remains permanently available, whilethere is a shared area which is used for viewing specificin-detail data and for executing commands. The key ben-efit of this approach is simplicity. The Ribbon frameworkhas been used to implement a command UI that is an al-ternative to the layered menus, toolbars, and task panes oftraditional Windows applications. The tabs are used fordisplaying different peer groups of content or functional-ity. The application features are organized into a series ofribbon tabs at the top of a window for each kind of visu-alization: Trend, Alarm, Configuration, Health Messagesand Snapshot. This has increased discoverability of fea-tures and functions, enabled quicker learning of the pro-

gram as a whole, and made users feel more in control oftheir experience with the application (see Fig. 2).

Context Sensitive Navigation and CollapsedContent

The OC implements Context sensitive navigation andcollapsed content to de-clutter the design. Thus, only therequired navigation elements are present on screen all thetime and others are shown only in certain situations. Fig-ure 3, which shows the Trend Page where group selectionpanel automatically collapses, providing more space fortrend viewing.

Content ChunkingContent chunking has been provided for presenting a

large number of alarms in smaller visual chunks so its eas-ier for operators to understand and interpret.

• The current alarms display is designed to provide aconsolidated highest priority status (ORing of threechannels alarm status); so that any signal causing sys-tem disturbance can be easily identified.

• Trend view supports ”Recently viewed trends” alongwith the signals selected for trending. This featureprovides the last three recent trends that have been se-lected to be viewed at a coarser resolution.

Attachment BoxesThey are an alternative to popup boxes with certain ben-

efits. The Attachment boxes are tied to the form/ button andcan be located on of its edge; as against pop up boxes thatopen up anywhere on the screen. This retains the context onwhich it was opened. It supports Hidden Navigation (DontLeave the screen principle). The pop-up boxes have to beclosed explicitly whereas the attachment boxes are hiddenas the cursor is moved out. The Date Time Change, user lo-gin and shut down are provided in the form of AttachmentBoxes (see Fig. 3).

Windows Presentation FoundationWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF) has been used

for UI design and development and provides the followingadvantages:

• Hardware acceleration: The OC workstations are pro-vided with high end graphics that incorporates paral-lel computing architecture and supports Microsoft Di-rectX. WPF built on top of DirectX allowed fast dataacquisition rate, archiving and responsiveness to the

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Figure 2: Ribbon View/Attchment Box for Login.

Figure 3: Operator Console for RTLS.

operator, permitting smoother graphics and enhancedperformance.

• Resolution independence: WPFs vector graphics al-lowed the same user- interface to be designed for dif-ferent monitor sizes of the control room(20 inch and30 inch)

• Declarative programming: Extensible ApplicationMark-up Language (XAML) declarative program-ming was used to define the layout of application ob-jects. This has now become a common trend in UIdevelopment for the design / code separation. This al-lowed parallel workflow of UI design and logic by dif-ferent team members. Also, tool support helped com-plete an iterative lifecycle of design development andtesting.

• Data Binding: OCs use the data binding capability ofWPF, look-less control model and data templates, to

achieve strong separation of display from state and be-haviour promoted by MVVM.

• Rich composition and customization: The OCs fordifferent systems of Control room featured the samedesign and layout but were customised throughthemes and skins to create a radically different look.

CONCLUSIONOCs have been successfully developed for Reactor Trip

Logic System, Alarm Annunciation System, Start-up Logicsystem and Emergency Core Cooling System for DhruvaReactor. OCs were designed with continuous discussionand suggestion with the operators and maintenance staff, soas to provide user-centric visualization to effectively copeup with the increasing complexity of the processes to bemonitored.

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