Situation-adaptive interface based on abstraction hierarchies with an updating mechanism for maintaining situation awareness of plant operators

Maintaining the situation awareness of human operators is one of the essential issues concerning the “human-centered automation” concept. There are two general requirements derived from the concept: (1) human operators must be kept adequately informed, and (2) the operators must be able to monitor the automation which is assisting them. This paper describes sub-requirements for human-machine interfaces to achieve these requirements. They are revealed through a theoretical analysis with following viewpoints: functions, means and ends, intentions, the reforming of models, and unanticipated situations. Along with these results, a design concept (a situation-adaptive interface based on dynamic abstraction hierarchies) is proposed