ABSTRACT
As automation becomes increasingly common in industrial systems, the role of the operator becomes increasingly that of a supervisor. Nonetheless, operators are required to intervene in the control of automated systems, either to cope with emergencies or to improve the productivity of discrete manufacturing processes. Although there are many claims in the literature that the combination of human and computer is more effective than either alone, there is little quantitative modeling of what makes humans intervene, and hence little support for a scientific approach to the design of the role of operators in automated or hybrid systems. In this paper we describe a series of experiments which show that intervention is governed to a large extent by the operators’ trust in the efficacy of the automated systems, and their self confidence in their abilities as manual controllers. A quantitative model for the operator in continuous process control is described, and some preliminary data are introduced in the field of discrete manufacturing.
