Situated cognitive engineering for complex task environments

Human-Machine Cooperation (HMC) involves the accommodation of user characteristics, tasks and contexts in order to provide the 'right' information, services and functions at the 'right' time and in the 'right' way. Due to the adaptive nature of both the human and machine behavior, it is difficult to provide generic and detailed predictions on the overall human-machine performance. This paper presents a cognitive engineering framework to realize an adequate HMC performance, in which generic human-factors knowledge and HMC solutions are refined, contextualized and tested within the application domain, as part of an iterative HMC development process. Instead of one generic method for HMC design, we propose to establish situated cognitive engineering methods that comprise an increasing knowledge base on the most relevant human and machine factors for the concerning operations and technical design space in the different application domains. Two case studies show the development and application of such a method, respectively for space stations (i.e. SUITE) and naval ships (i.e. SEAMATE).