Simulation Studies of Interface Design

ABSTRACT The Human Factors Section of the Corporate Laboratories of the British Steel Corporation is engaged on a research programme aimed at providing design criteria for the integration of man and computers in process and production control. The methodology used in this research is an examination under simulation conditions of the information interface between the computers and the human decision-maker. Areas covered by this technique so far include certain aspects of basic oxygen steelmaking, the scheduling activity associated with the operation of soaking pits and an examination of computer based order entry systems. Results of the simulation work associated with these activities are reported and the plans for validating the information treatments developed under simulation are also reviewed. The mobile computer facility available to BISRA is to be used in the validation exercise to offer a 'real life' evaluation of the performance improvements suggested by the simulation experimentation. Although long term trends might suggest that larger and larger systems will eventually find implementation in most industrial situations it is considered that at least in the next decade the power of relatively small autonomous man/computer systems linked by both hard and soft data, will out-perform their larger, more deterministic, competitors if, and only if, a thorough examination of the man/computer interaction is made.