Part of the book series: NATO Conference Series ((HF,volume 15))

Abstract

With the increased automation of a wide range of man-machine systems, a characteristic of skilled human performance that gains increasing importance relates to the operator’s ability to monitor a system under automated control, to ensure that any departures from normal functioning are efficiently and promptly detected. Systems that humans must monitor vary widely both in their complexity (e.g., the number of variables that must be employed to describe their state) and also in terms of the salience or directness by which the occurrence of failures is indicated to the operator. In some systems, the existence of a malfunctioning component may be indicated simply by the enunciation of a visual or auditory indicator. However, with other systems, often those involving automated control or regulation of a dynamic time-varying process, the existence of a malfunction must sometimes be induced by the human operator from subtle changes in the relation between environmental inputs and system response.

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© 1981 Plenum Press, New York

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Wickens, C.D., Kessel, C. (1981). Failure Detection in Dynamic Systems. In: Rasmussen, J., Rouse, W.B. (eds) Human Detection and Diagnosis of System Failures. NATO Conference Series, vol 15. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9230-3_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9230-3_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4615-9232-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4615-9230-3

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