Designing Human-machine Cooperation Systems

This book, on the ergonomics of human-machine systems, isaimed at engineers specializing in informatics, automation, production or robotics, who are faced with a significant dilemmaduring the conception of human-machine systems. On the onehand, the human operator guarantees the reliability of the systemand has been known to salvage numerous critical situations throughan ability to reason in unplanned, imprecise and uncertainsituations; on the other hand, the human operator can beunpredictable and create disturbances in the automated system. The first part of the book is dedicated to the methods ofhuman-centered design, from three different points of view, thevarious chapters focusing on models developed by human engineersand functional models to explain human behavior in theirenvironment, models of cognitive psychology and models in thedomain of automobile driving. Part 2 develops the methods of evaluation of thehuman-machine systems, looking at the evaluation of theactivity of the human operator at work and human error analysismethods. Finally, Part 3 is dedicated to human-machine cooperation, where the authors show that a cooperative agent comprises aknow-how and a so-called know-how-to-cooperate and show the way todesign and evaluate that cooperation in real industrialcontexts.