A Human-Centred Design to Break the Myth of the “Magic Human” in Intelligent Manufacturing Systems

The techno-centred design approach, currently used in industrial engineering and especially when designing Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) voluntarily ignores the human operator when the system operates correctly, but supposes the human is endowed with “magic capabilities” to fix difficult situations. But this so-called magic human faces with a lack of elements to make the relevant decisions. This paper claims that the Human Operator’s role must be defined at the early design phase of the IMS. We try to show with examples of systems from manufacturing as well as from energy or transportation that the Human Centred Design approaches place explicitly the “human in the loop” of the system to be automated. We first show the limits of techno-centred design methods. Secondly we propose the principles of a balanced function allocation between human and machine and even a real cooperation between them. The approach is based on the system decomposition into an abstraction hierarchy (strategic, tactical, operational). A relevant knowledge of the human capabilities and limits leads to the choice of the adequate Level of Automation (LoA) according to the system situation.