Control Room Design

Before: A $1.13 billion automation and substation construction project at Hydro-Quebec’s Beauharnois Power Plant was designed using traditional IT approaches.Based on all standard study and design practices, this meant using computer screens to replace a 60-foot control panel that was the primary interface between operators and one of the world’s most complex arrays of high-voltage generating equipment putting out 11.7 billion kilowatt hours per year.The project stalled halfway through the changeover when operators raised safety concerns over losing visibility of critical information with the new system. Just one missed indicator could result in millions of dollars of damage to the power station and hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue for Hydro Quebec.

Unable to resolve the implementation problems, Hydro Quebec called in the Cognitive Group to determine what could be done to resume the project.

 After: We conducted a comprehensive cognitive ergonomics and task analysis at the operator level – the first time such an exercise had been conducted during the automation design process.

“I had never spent before that kind of time in a control room actually watching them work. I had met them in meetings, and that was the way it was done – I didn’t know it could have been done,” said André Gascon, the Hydro-Quebec official in charge of development of the control room automation system, “Up until then, we didn’t have the right questions and we didn’t get the right information. The cognitive approach to engineering filled a real void.”

We recommended and designed a new control panel integrated in the complete automation project and which met all the visibility, safety and decision-making needs of the operators.

The new design has proved itself perfectly through the first half of the automation and the project is slated for completion in 2004.
Old control pannel
Desk of the foreground and control panel in the background.		 New control panel
Desk of the foreground and control panel in the background.

We then proposed a quick fix which consisted of a patch over the existing control panel.
Before implementing the new panel and modifying the desk and control room layout, we tested the whole design with a large-scale mock up.

© 2009 Cognitive Group