Extending System Performance Past the Boundaries of Technical Maturity: Human-Agent Teamwork Perspective for Industrial Inspection
This framework aims to provide finer guidance for designers and stakeholders in conceptualizing human-agent collaboration and organizational settings for CPSS, addressing limitations in current Human Factors & Ergonomics (HF&E) tools for anticipating future work situations.
This paper proposes a framework to analyze human-agent teamwork (HAT) in Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSS) for industrial inspection, particularly in aircraft maintenance. It disaggregates manual work into functional requirements and scrutinizes each function to determine its feasibility and nature (autonomous, human, or hybrid), defining a concept called "technological coverage."
Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSS) performance for industry 4.0 is highly context-dependent, where three design areas arise: the artifact itself, the human-agent collaboration, and the organizational settings. Current HF&E tools are limited to conceptualize and anticipate future human-agent work situations with a fine-grained perspective. This paper explores how rich in-sights from work analysis can be translated into formative design patterns that provide finer guidance in conceptualizing the human-agent collaboration and the organizational settings. The current manual work content elicited is disaggregated into functional requirements. Each function is then scrutinized by a multidisciplinary design team that decides its feasibility and nature (autonomy function, human function, or hybrid function). By doing so, we uncover the technical capabilities of the CPSS in comparison with subject-matter experts` work activity. We called this concept technological coverage. The framework thereof allows close collaboration with design stakeholders to define detailed HAT configurations. We then imagined joint activity scenarios based on end-users work activity, the technological capabilities, and the interaction requirements to perform the work. We use a study on technological innovation in the aircraft maintenance domain to illustrate the framework`s early phases