ABSTRACT
The human operator is in the role of the high-end decision component, determining the work process and supervising the automation. With emergent technology highly automated systems can be beneficial on the one hand; but automation may also cause problems on its own. A new way of introducing automation into work systems will be advocated by this contribution, overcoming the classical pitfalls of human-automation interaction and simultaneously taking the benefit as required. This will be achieved by so-called cognitive automation. The cognitive process (CP) can be seen as a model of intelligent machine performance which is well suited for the design of artificial cognitive units (ACUs) with goal-directed decision-making and problem-solving capabilities based on a symbolic representation of the perceived situation. By additionally providing full knowledge of the prime work objectives to the automation it will be enabled to co-operate with the human operator in supervision and decision tasks, thus being intelligent machine assistants for the human operator in the workplace.
