Man/System Interface in Automated Manufacturing—The Research Challenge for Human Factors

Between the extreme of complete manual control and a totally automated control system is a continuum of arrangements in which man shares control with a computer. The most important of these arrangements today, and for the forseeable future, puts man in the role of supervisor: monitoring signals sensed and displayed by the computer, detecting deviations from a criterion state, and selecting, evaluating and implementing command override decisions that handle those unusual events for which computer programs cannot be written.