Hybrid control systems: user-interface design

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Human interaction with automation is ubiquitous, occurring in consumer products, transportation systems, biomedical systems, critical infrastructures, and scientific research platforms.  Problems in human-automation interaction have  resulted in major failures in expensive, high-risk, and safety-critical systems, yet few mathematical methods or tools to analyze human-automation systems exist.  To address this void, my research helps identify problems in human-automation interaction before systems are built, tested, and deployed.  My methods are based in hybrid control systems, which model both continuous dynamics (from physical processes) and discrete dynamics (from the automation's mode-logic). Systems controlled both by humans and by automation (also known as semi-automated, mixed-initiative, or human-automation systems) have eluded rigorous quantification by controls engineers for decades.  New techniques in hybrid reachability analysis and controller synthesis model the human upservisor's prerogative, yet allow for tractable control computations.  The result is a hybrid control law which provides the information content for advisories to be displayed to the user.  I plan to generalize these hybrid methods and tools to verify and design user-interfaces for hybrid systems, with application to flight management systems, the power grid, and human-supervised anesthesia. The anticipated impact of this research is to increase confidence in human interaction with automation and to reduce human-automation failures in deployed systems.  By identifying such errors in mathematical models, before actual systems are deployed, real-life problems in safety-critical systems can be prevented.  Mathematical and computational tools can create a new level of confidence and reliability in these systems, by predicting where failures might occur, and how human operators can prevent them.