Supporting Operator Complexity Management in Supervisory Control Systems

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Human operators in the aviation, process control and nuclear power industries play key roles in maintaining the safe operation of these enterprises with significant contributions to world trade and commerce. However, when mistakes are made, the consequences can be costly and often tragic. A key source of mistakes can be excessive complexity. Experienced operators develop powerful strategies and techniques for managing and reducing complexity. However, the introduction of new technologies can undermine or disrupt those strategies. The primary objective of this research is to understand how to effectively support operator complexity management strategies while introducing flexibility and increased efficiency to system operations.The proposed research program will investigate complexity management within the Air Traffic Control domain and extrapolate findings to other domains. Observations of current system operations and the results of part-task experiments examining specific changes to the operator task environment will be used to generate information and task design requirements and develop and evaluate prototype decision support tools preserving safe and more efficient operations. Additional case studies within other supervisory control domains will be used to further understand the key research issues.