A Rigorous View of Mode Confusion

Not only in aviation psychology, mode confusion is recognised as a significant safety concern. The notion is used intuitively in the pertinent literature, but with surprisingly different meanings. We present a rigorous way of modelling the human and the machine in a shared-control system. This enables us to propose a precise definition of "mode" and "mode confusion". In our modelling approach, we extend the commonly used distinction between the machine and the user's mental model of it by explicitly separating these and their safety-relevant abstractions. Furthermore, we show that distinguishing three different interfaces during the design phase reduces the potential for mode confusion. A result is a new classification of mode confusions by cause, leading to a number of design recommendations for shared-control systems which help to avoid mode confusion problems. A further result is a foundation for detecting mode confusion problems by model checking.

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