Marie-Pierre Pacaux-Lemoine

A Common Work Space for a Mutual Enrichment of Human-Machine Cooperation and Team-Situation Awareness

Abstract Especially in life-critical systems decision-making entails cognitive functions such as monitoring, as well as fault prevention and recovery. People involved in the control and management of such systems play two kinds of roles: positive thanks to their unique involvement and capacity to deal with the unexpected; and negative with their ability to make errors. But they are also able to detect and correct these mistakes and able to learn from them. Thus human-machine system designer can allow the humans an innovative behavior to be “aware” and to cope with unknown situations by enhancing Situation Awareness (SA). As humans are more and more involved in collective works the constructs of team-SA are important. But the literature shows a great variety and some incoherence in their definitions. That makes difficult to build a design methodology favoring human SA. In parallel, human machine cooperation models have been developed in the last two decades and validated in different dynamic application fields: Air Traffic Control, fighter aircraft cockpit, reconnaissance robot. These studies showed an increase of the problem solving capabilities and a decrease of workload when the tasks are performed by cooperative teams. In this paper we first synthesize main team-SA constructs, we then present principles of humans-machines cooperation and present a Common Work Space as a medium that allow cooperation. We propose to extend it in order to enrich team-SA constructs.

Towards Vertical and Horizontal Extension of Shared Control Concept

Goals of shared control usually focus on the sharing of the action. Several examples such as shared control in robotics, in car driving, in wheelchair control highlight the interest for Human operator to be able to take part in the control of a process in the same way as assistance systems. Moreover, with the haptic shared control, Human operator can feel what could be or what is the current action of the assistance system. But if shared control is so useful today in some domains and will also be very interesting for other domains, it is because action is not the only function that Human operator can share with an assistance system. In fact, we would even like to suppose that the more Human operator and assistance systems share problem solving process functions, the more their cooperation would be safe, efficient, and comfortable. The objective of this paper is to propose an extension of the use of Shared control concept by giving other opportunities for Human operator and assistance system to share activity. The horizontal extension relates the integration of all the functions, from information gathering to action implementation. The vertical extension relates the integration of the levels of activity usually represented by the strategic, tactical and operational levels. Human machine cooperation principles are used to attempt such an objective.

A Common Work Space to Support the Air Traffic Control

Abstract This paper deals with the research of means to build a Human-Machine Cooperation in the Air Traffic Control. The experiment described aims at evaluating a principle of dynamic allocation of conflict resolution on a large scale simulator of air traffic control. Artificial and human agents have to cooperate to exchange information, to take decision and to command the air traffic. To analyse and define cooperation between agents, the know-how and the know-how-to-cooperate are defined. These concepts give a structure which allows to build a Common Work Space to support more efficiently the cooperation.

Designing intelligent manufacturing systems through Human-Machine Cooperation principles: A human-centered approach

Abstract Since the start of industrialization, machine capabilities have increased in such a way that human control of processes has evolved from simple (with mechanization) to cognitive (with computerization), and even emotional (with semi/full automation). The processes have also evolved from simple to complicated, and now complex systems, in the emerging context of Industry 4.0. This is notably the case with Intelligent Manufacturing Systems in which processes have become so autonomous that humans are unaware of the processes running, while they may need to intervene to update the manufacturing plan or modify the process configuration if a machine breaks down, or to assist process-intelligent entities when they find themselves in a deadlock. This paper highlights the lack of attention paid to the correct integration of humans in Intelligent Manufacturing Systems and provides solutions based on Human-Machine Cooperation principles to retain humans in the process control loop with different levels of involvement identified by the levels of automation. The aim of these principles is to propose a human-centered approach to design and evaluate systems, processes, and their interactions with humans. Herein, these principles are detailed and applied to Intelligent Manufacturing Systems using Artificial Self-Organizing systems (ASO) as an example. An assistance system was designed to support cooperation between ASO and human operators. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the system and its utility in improving the performance of Human-Machine Systems, as well as its acceptability with regard to human factors. The results presented highlight the advantages of the approach within the context of Industry 4.0.

Towards Levels of Cooperation

The interest of cooperation is more and more highlighted. When competition has been presented as the main driving force of species evolution, cooperation is today presented as the mean for everything or everyone to reach the necessary symbiosis with another one to exist and to evolve. Cooperation has been central to our studies now for over twenty years, with the conviction that automation has to take part in evolution supporting individual activity with an assistance system or supporting interactions. Model of cooperative activity is presented in order to help to define such supports, as well as Levels of Cooperation (LoC) which are combinations of parts of the model. Nevertheless, each one is always assessing the interest of cooperation by the valuation of the risk to loose or the chance to earn something. In this paper, we propose to use BCD (Benefit/Cost/Deficit) model to assess such a risk or chance to cooperate. Model of cooperative activity in terms of know-how and know-how-to-cooperate and model of BCD are first presented and used together in order to define a way to design and to evaluate new or existing human(s)-machine(s) systems.

Cooperating with an assistance tool for safe driving

Abstract The LAMIH particularly the research group Human-Machine Systems, has studied human-machine cooperation for many years, in a variety of contexts where safety is essential. Our approach is multi-disciplinary and uses different models and methods to elaborate symbolic and formal representations of human-machine cooperation. Our principal objective is to propose and evaluate a semi-formal framework for modeling cooperative activities between human or artificial agents, each of which has a different level of ability, reliability or adaptability. In the present study, human-machine cooperation was analyzed in order to define and evaluate a system capable of taking the full control of an automobile so as to avoid traffic accidents.

BCD MODEL FOR HUMAN STATE IDENTIFICATION

Abstract The paper presents an attempt to use the so-called BCD model (i.e., Benefit/Cost/Deficit model) in order to identify the human state. Different human states are taken into account from the automation and mechanical viewpoints to the psychological and physiological ones. Various signals identifying these human states can be analysed firstly alone, and then together in order to identify Benefit, Cost and Deficit parameters of a situation, here a driving traffic situation, and to analyse the impact of human state stability on safety driving.

Towards adaptability of levels of automation with Human-machine cooperation approach

The current study focuses on how the levels of automation and the number of simultaneous functions that complete the task demands affect the human operator performance. The research objective is to assess the effects of different levels of automation of vehicles (teleoperated VS. autonomous) and the complexity of the task on human operator performance. An experiment is realized using the simulation environment “Mixed Initiative Experimental” (MIX) which is designed for research and training with unmanned systems. The MIX platform aims to respond to the need for warfighters support and training in the domain of robotic military equipment and unmanned systems in general. The complexity of the task is simulated by increasing the number of autonomous vehicles that a human operator has to supervise or to teleoperate.

Human-machine cooperation to design Intelligent Manufacturing Systems

Since the start of industrialization, machine capabilities have increased in such a way that the control of processes by humans is becoming increasingly complex. This is especially the case in Intelligent Manufacturing Systems for which processes tend to be so autonomous that humans are more and more unaware of processes running, particularly when humans may need to intervene to update the manufacturing plan or to modify the process configuration if machines or intelligent entities need assistance. The present paper proposes solutions based on the use of Human(s)-Machine(s) Cooperation (HMC) principles to support humans in the process control. The aim of these principles is to adopt a human-centered approach for the design and evaluation of assistance systems and processes, as well as their interaction with humans. Two main complementary features of HMC, the know-how and the know-how-to-cooperate, are detailed. They provide a very useful approach to design task allocation, support for mutual understanding and communication between one human operator and one Artificial Self Organizing system. An assistance system resulting from this approach was evaluated and first results highlighted the improvement of global performance and acceptability.

Common work space or how to support cooperative activities between human operators: application to fighter aircraft

In order to improve capacities and capabilities of human-machine system, interactions between agents are inclined to be more frequent and more complex. Nevertheless, these interactions can not be always developed by verbal activities and must be supported by a media. The contribution of this paper is to propose the concept of common work space which allows agents, human or artificial, to develop cooperative activities. This concept has been implemented and evaluated in the fields of the fighter aircraft.