Employee Availability Improvements through Personnel Control System Design

The design of the personnel control system at a nuclear facility can have the availability of employees at their work station. This paper presents a methodology—based on a stochastic network approach—which can be used to quantify the effect of changes in the design of a personnel control system on employee availability. To illustrate the technique, a model of the personnel control system for the DOE's Fuels and Materials Examination Facility on the Hanford Reservation near Richland, Washington has been constructed using the Q-GERT network simulation language. Monte Carlo simulations of personnel flow (with queueing) within the model network were carried out for a base case and for specific modifications to the base case to determine the impact of design changes in the personnel control system on certain worker performance measures such as worker availability. Results of these simulations show that certain modifications to the personnel control system entailing staggering of shifts and improvements and additions to existing hardware can lead to significant savings in yearly costs. a significant influence on