ABSTRACT
The demand of industries for safer and more efficient operations has changed the human role in many systems from primary actor to supervisor of an automated process. This is particularly true for rapid transport systems, manufacturing production lines and computerised systems; however a certain degree of attention towards human-machine interaction is always required even if it is just for maintenance, commissioning and sporadic supervision (Leva et al., 2012). Additionally, when the complexity of the system increases, the reluctance of the designers to substitute the operator with automated functions will increase as well. This is because the ability of the human to control the system in unforeseen circumstances can help the system to keep functioning normally (Hale et al., 2007) i.e. designers cannot foresee all eventualities and people have good capability – if well supported by design, training and understanding of the system and system state – to diagnose and deal with such problems. Computers do not have this ability and therefore cannot be considered as the only available source of control. Therefore there is a general preference to have the human as a final authority working with the computerized system. Hence, the human operator’s task, to operate and control the system, is considered crucial (Nazir et al., 2013). In accident investigations, design inadequacies are often mentioned as a major contributing factor (Hale et al., 2007) and human error is almost always described as a major cause of accidents (OGP, 2010).
