Suchergebnisse

Objective In this review, we investigate the relationship between agent transparency, Situation Awareness, mental workload, and operator performance for safety critical domains. Background The advancement of highly sophisticated automation across safety critical domains poses a challenge for effective human oversight. Automation transparency is a design principle that could support humans by making the automation's inner workings observable (i.e., "seeing-into"). However, experimental support for this has not been systematically documented to date. Method Based on the PRISMA method, a broad and systematic search of the literature was performed focusing on identifying empirical research investigating the effect of transparency on central Human Factors variables. Results Our final sample consisted of 17 experimental studies that investigated transparency in a controlled setting. The studies typically employed three human-automation interaction types: responding to agent-generated proposals, supervisory control of agents, and monitoring only. There is an overall trend in the data pointing towards a beneficial effect of transparency. However, the data reveals variations in Situation Awareness, mental workload, and operator performance for specific tasks, agent-types, and level of integration of transparency information in primary task displays. Conclusion Our data suggests a promising effect of automation transparency on Situation Awareness and operator performance, without the cost of added mental workload, for instances where humans respond to agent-generated proposals and where humans have a supervisory role. Application Strategies to improve human performance when interacting with intelligent agents should focus on allowing humans to see into its information processing stages, considering the integration of information in existing Human Machine Interface solutions.

Safety-critical industries have long been subjected to extensive research and development to enhance operator performance to improve their efficiency. From a human factors perspective, much of the work in process industries is related to either enhancing technical training of operators or related to improving the physical ergonomics of hazardous workplaces. The importance of Nontechnical Skills (NTS) in the process industries have traditionally been less emphasized, while other domains (e.g., aviation, healthcare) have led the development of investigating and improving NTS for the sharp-end operators. This study aims to investigate the association of NTS deficiencies to the major accidents from the past 5 years in the process industries within the European Union by analyzing the accident reports from The Major Accident Reporting System (MARS) database. The accident analysis results reveal potential NTS deficiencies in 27% (17 out of 64) of the cases involving the lack of situational awareness, decision making, problem-solving, communication, leadership, and time management issues. Based on the results of the analysis, a few implications, as well as future research directions, are proposed, which could facilitate the stakeholders in addressing NTS deficiencies of European process industry operators.