Parasuraman’s paper discusses a model for types and levels of automation that provides a framework and an objective basis for making such choices. The framework is based upon four broad classes of functions: information acquisition, information analysis, decision and action selection and action implementation. The article defines automation as the full or partial replacement of a function previously carried out by the human operator. This is an important distinction because there is a difference between automation and automatic systems.

There are some important factors to consider when designing a system around automation especially since it involves replacing human involvement. The evidence suggests that well designed information automation can change human operator mental workload to a level that is appropriate for the system tasks to be performed. Along with this aspect, there are three costs associated with this. The first cost is that of situational awareness where the decision making functions may reduce the operator’s awareness of the system and of certain dynamic features of the work environment. The next cost is that if the automation system is to good at making correct decisions, than the operator may not monitor the automation and its information sources and hence fail to detect the occasional times when the automation system fails. The final cost is the if the decision-making function is consistently performed by automation, there will come a time when the human operator will not be as skilled in performing that function.

In evaluating this criteria, it seems apparent that the automation system can not be a direct replacement for the human component but instead should be used in conjunction with a human operator in a shared work environment. For the automation system to work in this environment, there needs to be a level of trust from the human operator and this is where automation reliability becomes an important determinant of human use of automated systems. Due to the noisiness of the real world, there will always be some level of error with automating the decision process and therefore human operators are necessary to work in conjunction with the automation system.

There is a fine balance between creating entirely autonomous systems for mission critical applications and having a human operator monitor those systems. The reason for this is that because the decision process is created by humans, there is bound to be error on the part of the system because no human is perfect. There will be a need for human monitoring of these systems to guarantee that errors are caught in a timely fashion and that the critical systems respond appropriately. The automation framework provides a starting point for addressing these concerns of what types and what levels of automation should be introduced to any given system.

Reference:

  1.  Parasuraman, Raja. “A Model for Types and Levels of Human Interaction with Automation.” <http://hci.cs.uwaterloo.ca/faculty/elaw/cs889/reading/automation/sheridan.pdf>