User assistance by situational, task- and model-based process information filtering in interactive, semi-automated human-automation systems

Nowadays, the integration of users into technical systems becomes necessary due to reasons of automation concepts that are not capable of completely integrating process knowledge and manufacturing skills for full automation of technical processes. In such interactive, semi-automated systems human operators are facing a high amount of process information that need to be evaluated according to individual skills and knowledge to situational and necessary actions including the evaluation of alternatives etc. In order to benefit from human abilities of information fusion and sophisticated comprehension of process coherence in complexity gaining environments, integrated approaches as framework for guiding and supervision assistance systems of semi-automated, technical systems can be developed. Thereby, the advantage of having an uniform description of the entire, interactive system (consisting of human, machine, and technical process) as framework allows the implementation of methods for a situational, task-oriented assessment of existing information and corresponding filtering, respectively. The resulting reduced set of process-relevant information allows the human operator to focus during the decision making process and supports maintaining process reliability and quality. In this contribution, recent modeling approaches of Human-Automation-Interaction, e.g. Message-based Part State Graphs [1] or Enriched Labeled Transition Systems [2] are discussed with respect to their ability of being suitable to serve as framework and are compared to the Situation-Operator-Model (SOM) introduced by [3]. Using the SOM approach, considered interactive processes can be represented by a set of situations defined by characteristics connected through operators representing (human or technical) actions. Tasks are described by defining final situations that need to be reached and process information are fused to a situation vector representing the actual state of the entire system. Suitable information is identified by comparison of differences in future situations and used for the detection of valuable information with respect to the defined (sub)task. The hierarchical task analysis [4] of a semi-automated molding process using No-Bake-Technique is additional discussed as an illustrative application example that is completely mapped into the SOM-framework. Furthermore, the results of a user study of selected functionality of the developed process guiding and supervision assistance system are presented.