Engineering Automations: From a Human Factor Perspective to Design, Implementation and Validation Challenges

In the literature, automation is usually addressed as a goal (produce systems that are as autonomous as possible) as a process (producing systems with autonomous behaviors) or as a state (a system performing in an autonomous way). These uses suggest that automation is a global concept that does not need decomposing. However, when designing systems (including interactive systems), automation can only be incorporated at very low-level details, when some functions (previously performed by humans) are migrated to the system. There is a similarity between this global vision of automation and the global vision of human body in biology before the advent of anatomy (that aims at decomposing organisms in parts) and physiology (that aims at understanding the functions of organisms and their parts). This presentation will follow the path of anatomy and physiology to understand better what automation is, how automation can be designed, how partly autonomous systems can better support users and why full automation is a desirable but foolish, inadvisable and unwise target.