Basic Concepts in Supervisory Control

of Research Results Research on human interaction with automation in many domains including aviation and anesthesiology has shown that automated systems often fail to function as team players (Norman, 1990; Billings, 1991; 1996; Malin et al., 1991; Sarter and Woods, 1994b). To summarize the data, automated systems that are strong, silent, clumsy, and difficult to direct are not team players. Automated systems are: (a) strong when they can act autonomously; (b) silent when they provide poor feedback about their activities and intentions, (c) clumsy when they interrupt their human partners during high workload, high criticality periods or add new mental burdens during these high tempo periods , and (d) difficult to direct when it is costly for the human supervisor to instruct the automation about how to change as circumstances change. Systems with these characteristics create new problems for their human partners and new forms of system failure.