“From Tool to Agent”: The Evolution of (Cockpit) Automation and Its Impact on Human-Machine Coordination

Abstract

In a variety of domains, researchers have observed breakdowns in human-automation coordination and cooperation. One form of breakdown is a lack of mode awareness which can result in ‘automation surprises’. These are, in part, related to a lack of adequate feedback on system status and behavior. The need for effective and timely feedback has become even more pressing with the evolution of systems that operate at increasingly high levels of authority and autonomy. In the absence of improved feedback design, however, the gap between required and available information has widened. To explore the impact of this trend towards ‘strong yet silent’ machine agents, a line of research was conducted on pilot-automation coordination on the Airbus A-320, an aircraft that exemplifies these trends. This research involved a survey of pilots' line experiences with the A-320 automation, observations of transition training to the airplane, and an experimental simulation study on pilots' mode awareness and pilot-automation coordination. The results of this work indicate a trend from mode errors of commission (which represented a more frequent problem on early generation ‘glass cockpit’ aircraft) to errors of omission. In other words, pilots were more likely to fail to observe and interfere with uncommanded and undesired automation and aircraft behavior. Such errors of omission also seem to have played a role in recent incidents and accidents. They illustrate the need for improved communicative abilities in autonomous and powerful systems to enable them to actively support the coordination between human and machine.