Visualization of complex situations to strengthen human-automation collaboration in real-time systems

Keeping humans in control of highly automated high stakes environments is one of the greatest emerging challenges for the combined areas of human-computer interaction and information visualization. High stakes domains are characterized by uncertain and sometimes unforeseen situations that may escalate rapidly.

In industries such as nuclear power management and air traffic control, information rich high stakes environments have emerged through automation of human work together with centralization of control and coordination. This pattern is now also emerging in other parts of society, such as home health care, emergency response, and ambulance dispatch.

Since it has proven practically impossible in high stakes domains to plan for every contingency, humans must collaborate with automated systems to stay in control. Situations and plans must simultaneously be considered on several levels, ranging from the status of physical items or actions, to overarching, and sometimes conflicting, qualities and goals. The goal of this project is to research generic methods for visualization of complex situations to strengthen human-automation collaboration in real-time systems, through research on: visualization and interaction techniques specifically targeting this area, integrating the visualization techniques in existing automated systems, and experimentally evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods.

The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council.