How Many Parameters May Be Displayed on a Large Scale Display Panel\ulcorner

Large scale display panel(LSDP) is a main component in the next generation main control rooms. LSDP is located at the front of VDU-based operator's workstation and plays an important role in providing operators with overall information of plant status through mimic diagram, text/digit, graph, and so on. A critical matter determined at the first stage of LSDP design is how much information is displayed, because the information density of LSDP affects operator's performance. Many human factors guidelines recommend low information density of displays to avoid degrade of operator's performance, but doesn't provide a useful limit of information density. In this paper, we considered information density as the number of plant parameters and investigated the proper number of plant parameters through a human factors experiment. The experiment with 4 subjects was carried out and response time, error, and heart rate variation as criterion measures were recorded and analyzed. As the results, it is identified that the proper number of parameters in a LSDP is about thirty.