A Human-Centred Design to Break the Myth of the “Magic Human” in Intelligent Manufacturing Systems
Résumé
The techno-centered design approach, currently used in industrial engineering and especially when designing Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) voluntarily ignores the human operator when the system operates correctly, but supposes the human is endowed with “magic capabilities” to fix difficult situations. But this so-called magic human faces with a lack of elements to make the relevant decision. This paper claims that the Human Operator(s) role must be defined at the early design phase of the IMS. We try to show with examples of systems from manufacturing as well as energy or transportation the Human Centered Design approaches that place explicitly the “human in the loop” of the system to be automated. We first show the limits of techno-centered design methods. Secondly we propose the principles of a balanced function allocation between human and machine and even a real cooperation between them. The approach is based on the system decomposition into an abstraction hierarchy for instance structural or temporal (strategic, tactical, operational). A relevant knowledge of the human capabilities and limits allows the task allocation and leads to the choice of the adequate Level of Automation (LoA) according to the system situation