Cognitive engineering of rule-based supervisory control systems: observations concerning users´ task performance

A rule-based supervisory control (RBSC) system is one in which a decision maker´s supervisory commands to the system are in the form of explicit condition-action (if-then) rules. The authors report observations of subjects performing a simulated tactical problem with an RBSC system and relate those observations to current cognitive models of decision-making performance. The performance of several subjects was observed and analyzed to obtain a sense of the qualitative nature and range of performance variation among subjects for this tactical problem. The observations focus on how decision makers go about specifying and using supervisory rules to control the RBSC system