The effect of information availability in a user interface (UI) on in-vehicle task performance: A pilot study

When performing an in-vehicle operation, the information display is a crucial element that decides the operator's control behaviors. The interaction between information presentation and operator's in-vehicle task performance is critical for vehicle safety. The question arises: What is the optimum availability of information? The aim of this study is to investigate the relationships between different information availabilities and operation performances as operators interact with an in-vehicle user interface (UI) to complete a simulated train driving task. The results show that some types of information significantly affect the operator's task performance. Information that improved the task performances were closely associated with specific task requirements. The participants' task performance indicated that they had a better awareness of a task situation and were better at controlling their virtual vehicle when completing time and process-restricted tasks with limited, relevant information. These results support the conclusion that more information does not always promote accuracy and safety during the task completion.Relevance to industryThis study presents a unique insight into the information display of in-vehicle UI design for vehicle control. The information available within an in-vehicle interface should be optimized by performance assessments to provide more useful information; this has significant positive effect on operator performance from an accuracy and safety perspective. Thus, this study provides advice for designing an in-vehicle UI.     

Alphanumeric and graphic displays for dynamic process monitoring and control

The use of high resolution graphic display technology provides the control system designer with numerous options for displaying process plant information. This research evaluated the effectiveness of alphanumeric and graphic display formats for presenting system information in a dynamic process plant environment Thirty subjects, divided equally into three groups, were tested on three separate display formats: graphical, digital and multiple representations. The operators' task was to optimize the performance of a simulated fluid processing plant and to detect system failures. Results showed that the multiple display resulted in the best optimization performance and minimized the time required to detect failures. In general, the graphic display produced the worst performance with the digital display exhibiting intermediate results. The decision strategies used by the operators were found to have the greatest impact on performance. The results are discussed in terms of the merits of different display formats for representing system information in a manner appropriate to the operator's task.     

A fuzzy logics clustering approach to computing human attention allocation using eyegaze movement cue

Human's attention is an important element in human–machine interface design due to a close relationship between operator's attention and operator's work performance. However, understanding of operator's attention allocation while he or she is performing a task remains a challenging task because attention is generally unobservable, immeasurable, and uncertain. In our previous study, we demonstrated the effectiveness of using operator's eye movement information to understand attention allocation, which has made attention observable. The present paper describes our study which addressed immeasurability and uncertainty of attention. Specifically, we used eye fixation's duration to indicate operator's attention and developed a new computational model for the attention and its allocation using fuzzy logics clustering techniques. Along with the development of this model, we also developed an experiment to verify the effectiveness of the model. The result of the experiment shows that the model is promising.     

Effects of training on short- and long-term skill retention in a complex multiple-task environment

The paper reports the results of an experiment on the performance and retention of a complex task. This was a computer-based simulation of the essential elements of a spacecraft's life support system. It allowed the authors to take a range of measures, including primary and secondary task performance, system intervention and information sampling strategies, mental model structure, and subjective operator state. The study compared the effectiveness of two methods of training, based on low level (procedure-based) and high level (system-based) understanding. Twenty-five participants were trained extensively on the task, then given a 1-h testing session. A second testing session was carried out 8 months after the first (with no intervening practice) with 17 of the original participants. While training had little effect on control performance, there were considerable effects on system management strategies, as well as in structure of operator's mental model. In the second testing session, the anticipated general performance decrement did not occur, though for complex faults there was an increase in selectivity towards the primary control task. The relevance of the findings for training and skill retention in real work environments is discussed in the context of a model of compensatory control.     

Intelligent manipulator system with nonsymmetric and redundant master-slave

Some work is so complicated and unsteady that it is not possible to use automatic robots, such as FA robots. In such a case, a teleoperated manipulation system is applied. In this research, the authors aim at a reduction in the operator's physical and mental burdens. An artificially intelligent manipulator system has been developed with nonsymmetric and redundant master-slave. This system has five features: (1) a polar coordinates master arm; (2) a highly operational articulated slave arm with 7 degrees of freedom; (3) a nonsymmetric configuration and different degrees of freedom master-slave control; (4) an expert system; and (5) a new master-slave control motion, which makes the operator's task easier with automatic force/position control. The system was experimentally produced and its performance tested and evaluated. A qualitative evaluation was carried out by conducting a comparative test on the conventional master-slave control and the new master-slave control. It was found to be effective in reducing operating time, as well as work-induced fatigue.     

Predictive human operator model to be utilized as a controller using linear,neuro-fuzzy and fuzzy-ARX modeling techniques

Modeling human operator's behavior as a controller in a closed-loop control system recently finds applications in areas such as training of inexperienced operators by expert operator's model or developing warning systems for drivers by observing the driver model parameter variations. In this research, first, an experimental setup has been developed for collecting data from human operators as they controlled a nonlinear system. Appropriate reference signals and scenarios were designed according to the system identification and human operator modeling theory, to collect data from subjects. Different modeling schemes, namely ARX models as linear approach, and adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) as intelligent modeling approach have been evaluated. A hybrid modeling method, fuzzy-ARX (F-ARX) model, has been developed and its performance was found to be better in terms of predicting human operator's control actions as well as replacing the operator as a stand-alone controller. It has been concluded that F-ARX models can be a good alternative for modeling the human operator.     

Effects of display design on performance in a simulated ship navigation environment

Although automation is playing an increasing role on the ship's bridge, empirical research on the effectiveness of alternative bridge designs is limited. In this paper, we describe an experimental study of the benefits of integrated information display, using a computerized simulation of a highly automated ship's bridge. The study compared three types of interface design, which presented radar and electronic chart information to the operator in different ways: (a) integrated display, (b) functionally-separate display, and (c) spatially-separate display. Effects were examined in relation to time on watch and scenario complexity. Following extensive training on the task, 39 participants were tested over a 4-h experimental session, during which they encountered a sequence of collision scenarios of varying complexity. Using a dual-task methodology, a range of measures of primary and secondary task performance were taken, together with assessment of information sampling behaviour and subjective operator state (workload, fatigue, anxiety and situation awareness). The results indicated slight navigational advantages of the integrated display over the two alternative display types, although it also incurred higher levels of operator cost, particularly fatigue. There were no marked effects of time on watch, but more complex scenarios were associated with impaired performance, increased workload and reduced situation awareness. Overall, the findings have suggested some benefits of integrating primary information sources in a ship's bridge environment. The study further confirms the value of experimental simulations as tools for investigating design issues for ship's bridge automation.     

Applications of meta‐heuristics to traffic engineering in IP networks

Intra‐domain routing protocols are based on shortest path first (SPF) routing, where shortest paths are calculated between each pair of nodes (routers) using pre‐assigned link weights, also referred to as link metric. These link weights can be modified by network administrators in accordance with the routing policies of the network operator. The operator's objective is usually to minimize traffic congestion or minimize total routing cost subject to the traffic demands and the protocol constraints. However, determining a link weights combination that best suits the network operator's requirements is a difficult task. This paper provides a survey of meta‐heuristic approaches to traffic engineering, focusing on local search approaches and extensions to the basic problem taking into account changing demands and robustness issues with respect to network failures.     

THE INFLUENCE OF NOISE ON TWO DISCRIMINATION TASKS

Abstract

Recent research has revealed that noise effects on work become apparent in an increasingly irregularity of reaction times instead of in a general decrease in the total number of reactions. This paper is concerned with the measurement of the degree of irregularity in two paper-and-pencil tasks. Both tests were performed twice on different days for half an hour each. The experiment was designed to compare two different noiso conditions : in one the noise changed randomly about an average level of 75 dB., in the other it was steady at 70 da.

The number of reactions in every minute was scored. To reach conclusions from the scores about the dogree of regularity of the reaction times, a measure of the variance of the scores waa used. Sinco there appeared a linear trend of score with time, it was decided to calculate the variance of the differences of score betwoen successive minutes rather than of the scores themselves. Two variances wore calculated for each day's work at each task, one over the first fourteen, and one over the last fourteen differences. The ratio of the variances (variance quotient) was taken as an indication of tho change of irregularity as performance proceeded. The results showed that in one task tho variance quotient was singificantly larger under conditions of varying than steady noise. In the other task the same trend appeared in the second day's session but not in tho first. The results favour Broadbent's hypothesis that unpredictable noise affects performance more than does monotonous noise.     

Effects of display design on performance in a simulated ship navigation environment

Although automation is playing an increasing role on the ship's bridge, empirical research on the effectiveness of alternative bridge designs is limited. In this paper, we describe an experimental study of the benefits of integrated information display, using a computerized simulation of a highly automated ship's bridge. The study compared three types of interface design, which presented radar and electronic chart information to the operator in different ways: (a) integrated display, (b) functionally-separate display, and (c) spatially-separate display. Effects were examined in relation to time on watch and scenario complexity. Following extensive training on the task, 39 participants were tested over a 4-h experimental session, during which they encountered a sequence of collision scenarios of varying complexity. Using a dual-task methodology, a range of measures of primary and secondary task performance were taken, together with assessment of information sampling behaviour and subjective operator state (workload, fatigue, anxiety and situation awareness). The results indicated slight navigational advantages of the integrated display over the two alternative display types, although it also incurred higher levels of operator cost, particularly fatigue. There were no marked effects of time on watch, but more complex scenarios were associated with impaired performance, increased workload and reduced situation awareness. Overall, the findings have suggested some benefits of integrating primary information sources in a ship's bridge environment. The study further confirms the value of experimental simulations as tools for investigating design issues for ship's bridge automation.     

A comparison of hierarchically paged and scrolling displays for fault finding

The selection of test points when fault finding with a hierarchically paged display is more efficient than when using a scrolling display. However, this difference is not found with more able subjects. An unexpected finding is that both displays seem to facilitate more consistent performance than that obtained when the operator's view of the system is unrestricted. The effect of restricting system information by a ‘window’, as both types of display do, is discussed in terms of strategies operators may adopt in consequence, in particular strategies to cope with memory load.     

Factors affecting performance on a target monitoring task employing an automatic tracker

The experiments in this paper examined the extent to which performance on a task employing an automatic tracker was similar to performance on tasks employing other types of automation that have been studied more extensively. Automated target tracking is being used in many sensor and navigation systems to improve performance and help the operator cope with increased data loads. With many automated systems these goals are not met. In particular, the operator often misses errors made by the automated system and may report no decrease in workload. Several hypotheses have been offered for the operator's failure to monitor an automated system adequately. These include lack of experience with the manual task, a vigilance decrement, complacency, and inappropriate level of automation. The relevance of each of these hypotheses to failure to monitor an automatic tracker adequately was examined. Performance and perceived workload on a target tracking task employing an automatic tracker, in which participants had to detect and then update the position of several targets (e.g. ships) at regular intervals, were measured as a function of number of targets, training with the manual task, experience, and time on task. The results suggested that failure to detect errors made by the automated system was due largely to the lack of visibility of the automation errors relative to other errors. However, complacency could not be ruled out entirely. Unlike some other tasks, the availability of a reliable automatic tracker did lead to a substantial reduction in perceived workload.     

A robust strategy for real-time process monitoring

An operator support system (OSS) is proposed to reliably retain salient information in a high dimensional and correlated database, to uncover linear and nonlinear correlations among variables, to reconstruct failed/unavailable sensors, and to assess process-operating performance in the presence of noise and outliers. The proposed strategy carries out the task in three steps. In the first step, a robust tandem filter is used to suppress noise and reject any outlying observations. Next, an orthogonal nonlinear principal component analysis network is utilized to optimally retain a parsimonious representation of the system. In the final step, the process status is checked against the normal operating region defined by kernel density estimation, and failed/unavailable sensors are reconstructed via constrained optimization and the trained network. The strategy is demonstrated in real-time using a pilot-scale distillation column.     

Modeling the cognitive content of displays

An approach for measuring the cognitive complexity of visual displays is discussed and applied to a dynamic display of avionic information. A semantic network formalism is used to model two interrelated knowledge systems, world knowledge and display knowledge. The information the operator receives during training about the general display format characteristics and the task requirements, along with other previously stored information, constitutes world knowledge. The semantic content of a particular configuration of information encountered during task performance constitutes display knowledge. Four orthogonal predictor measures of cognitive complexity were derived from the networks. In an experiment three of the orthogonal predictors were significantly correlated with task performance. After averaging across operators, the three significant predictors accounted for 99% of the variation of display effectiveness. Results indicate that a model of cognitive complexity based on a semantic network formalism may provide a useful technique for quantitatively evaluating the quality of competing display format concepts.     

Forgotten Alternatives in Skill and Work-load

Abstract

This paper suggests that the nature of process control skill lies in the changed decision making made possible with increased knowledge of process behaviour. During learning, feedback about process output indicates that the process needs correcting, and also that the operator must adjust his choice of action. An experienced operator knows the correct error-action alignment, so has less need to check and correct both the process and his own behaviour. He has a lower work-load and a larger task capacity. Choice of appropriate control actions requires knowledge of the effects of his own behaviour as well as that of the process, and assessment of the task context, If behaviour is chosen to maintain the operator's mental and physical state, as well as to maintain the process, this requires further knowledge about his own potential behaviour, his internal state, and criteria for acceptability of his own state. High task demands may lead to performance breakdown because they cause unfamiliar decision situations, so the operator is returned to inexperienced, less effective types of behaviour.     

A graphic modeling and analysis tool for human fault diagnosis tasks

This study presents a graphic modeling and analysis tool for use in constructing an operator's mental model in fault diagnosis tasks. In most automatic and complicated process control systems, human fault diagnosis tasks have become increasingly complex and specialized. The system designer should consider the cognitive process of human operator to avert failure of implement action owing to a lack of compatibility between humans and aiding system interface. Here, an experiment is performed to investigate the nature of human fault diagnosis. A graphic modeling and analysis tool is then proposed to model the continuous process of human fault diagnosis. The approach proposed herein exploits both the line-chart and Petri nets to demonstrate the operator's thoughts and actions. Moreover, results in this study are integrated into an adaptive standard diagnosis model that can assess the operators' mental workload and accurately depict the interactions between human operator and aiding system.Relevance to industryAutomatic intelligent diagnosis systems can not provide satisfactory operating performance. Human diagnosticians are more effective than computer ones. Results in this study offer further insight into an operator behavior in graphic form and also how to design a better aiding system.     

Do whole-body vibrations affect spatial hearing?

To assist the human operator, modern auditory interfaces increasingly rely on sound spatialisation to display auditory information and warning signals. However, we often operate in environments that apply vibrations to the whole body, e.g. when driving a vehicle. Here, we report three experiments investigating the effect of sinusoidal vibrations along the vertical axis on spatial hearing. The first was a free-field, narrow-band noise localisation experiment with 5- Hz vibration at 0.88 ms^? 2. The other experiments used headphone-based sound lateralisation tasks. Experiment 2 investigated the effect of vibration frequency (4 vs. 8 Hz) at two different magnitudes (0.83 vs. 1.65 ms^? 2) on a left–right discrimination one-interval forced-choice task. Experiment 3 assessed the effect on a two-interval forced-choice location discrimination task with respect to the central and two peripheral reference locations. In spite of the broad range of methods, none of the experiments show a reliable effect of whole-body vibrations on localisation performance.     

A comparison of the augmented bar display and the object display

Two experiments were performed to test the hypothesis that object displays facilitate integration task performance because they contain information that is not readily accessible in standard bar displays. The first experiment demonstrated that when the extra information present in an object display is added to a bar display, as in the augmented bar display, integration task performance can be improved in the bar display. The second experiment shows that integration task performance is poor with an object display when the extra information present in the object display is not relevant to the integration task. If the decision statistic can be specified at the time of display design, an augmented bar display may be appropriate since it offers good performance for both separate and integral tasks; if the decision statistic cannot be specified at the time of display design, the use of an object display may hinder performance if the decision statistic and emergent feature are not correlated.     

Human-object integrated assembly intention recognition for context-aware human-robot collaborative assembly

Human-robot collaborative (HRC) assembly combines the advantages of robot's operation consistency with human's cognitive ability and adaptivity, which provides an efficient and flexible way for complex assembly tasks. In the process of HRC assembly, the robot needs to understand the operator's intention accurately to assist the collaborative assembly tasks. At present, operator intention recognition considering context information such as assembly objects in a complex environment remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a human-object integrated approach for context-aware assembly intention recognition in the HRC, which integrates the recognition of assembly actions and assembly parts to improve the accuracy of the operator's intention recognition. Specifically, considering the real-time requirements of HRC assembly, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks (ST-GCN) model based on skeleton features is utilized to recognize the assembly action to reduce unnecessary redundant information. Considering the disorder and occlusion of assembly parts, an improved YOLOX model is proposed to improve the focusing capability of network structure on the assembly parts that are difficult to recognize. Afterwards, taking decelerator assembly tasks as an example, a rule-based reasoning method that contains the recognition information of assembly actions and assembly parts is designed to recognize the current assembly intention. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach for recognizing human intentions are verified. The integration of assembly action recognition and assembly part recognition can facilitate the accurate operator's intention recognition in the complex and flexible HRC assembly environment.     

Providing synthetic views for teleoperation using visual posetracking in multiple cameras

This paper describes a visual tool for teleoperative experimentation involving remote manipulation and contact tasks. Using modest hardware, it recovers in real time the pose of moving polyhedral objects, and presents a synthetic view of the scene to the operator of a teleoperated robot using any chosen viewpoint and viewing direction. To recover pose, the method of line tracking first introduced by Harris (1992) is extended to multiple calibrated cameras, and its dynamic performance improved using robust methods and iterative filtering. Experiments are reported which determine the static and dynamic performance of the vision system, and its use in teleoperation is illustrated in two experiments, a peg-in-hole manipulation task and an impact control task