ABSTRACT
We can think of supervisory control as a situation in which the human works through the medium of a talented assistant. As machines have become more intelligent, or at least more clever, and posses increasing computational power, which can be incorporated into very powerful automatic control systems, the primary task of the human operator has become that of a monitor, since in order to decide to intervene or to help the assistant, the operator must first estimate the state of the system and decide whether there is any need for additional human skill. In traditional industrial tasks, this amounts to supervising the work of other humans: here it means supervising the work of a machine assistant.
