Operator´s situation awareness under different levels of automation; evaluations through probabilistic human cognitive simulations

The human-centered automation concept claims two general requirements on situation awareness (SA) of human operators. One is the necessity of keeping the SA of an artifact, and the other is keeping the SA of automation. Nevertheless, the fundamental methods or techniques, especially quantitative ones, are not mature enough to be used as rational tools for human-machine design. An important approach for establishing the method must be identification of a proper “level of automation”, where ten levels are proposed by T.B. Sheridan (1999). A goal of the research presented is to establish a theoretical framework for evaluating automation levels from a viewpoint of operator´s situation awareness in real domains. A method using discrete event simulation is developed, and applied to a particular artifact: a nuclear power plant