Designing adaptive systems: selecting an invoking threshold to improve human performance

Abstract

Previous adaptive automation design research has focussed on the decisions of how to automate, how much to automate, and what to automate. Another important factor that has not been widely considered is when to automate. As adaptive systems become more viable, the design decision of when to automate (i.e. the workload/taskload level that should be used to invoke the adaptive automation) will become increasing important. This research uses human performance simulation to analyse the impact of adaptive automation thresholds on operator workload and situation awareness. Through an unmanned ground and aerial vehicle case study using human trials and discrete-event simulation, this research reveals that the effectiveness of the adaptive automation requires a deliberate trade-off between performance, workload, and situation awareness goals.