Beyond Levels of Automation: An Architecture for More Flexible Human-Automation Collaboration

Supervisory control has long been recognized as a design concept for enhancing the effectiveness of human-automation interaction, but real time supervisory relationships with automation have rarely approached the flexibility of human-human supervisory relationships. In part, this may be because our models of human-automation relationships— primarily, Sheridan and Verplank's (1978) concept of Levels of Automation—have been unidimensional and too coarse-grained. Parasuraman, Wickens and Sheridan (2000) acknowledged this limitation and extended the levels of automation model to include a second, albeit coarse-grained, dimension based on stages of information processing. We argue that, for the purpose of providing a detailed architecture to support collaborative delegation interactions, this process needs to be taken further. By applying the levels of automation spectra across a detailed task model of tasks in a work domain, we create a suitably complex and flexible model of task performance which can be shared between humans and automation and used as the vocabulary for delegation interactions. This architecture is illustrated in human tasking of multiple Unmanned Air Vehicles.