Automation vs.
Human
Intervention: What Is the Best Fit
for the Best Performance?
Joel M. Haight, PhD, PE, and Vladislav Kecojevic, PhD
Dept. of Energy and Geo-Environmental Engineering, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802; jmh44@psu.edu
(for correspondence)
Published online 3 January 2005 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/prs.10050
In today’s complex industrial processes, automated
control systems are a necessity. However, is complete
automation the answer? Whereas control system auto-
mation provides predictable, consistent performance, it
is lacking in human judgment, adaptability, and logic.
Although humans provide these, we are unpredictable,
inconsistent, and subject to emotions and motivation.
To maximize system performance, should we automate
humans out of the system? . . . or . . . Do we maximize
human input and lose efficient, consistent, error-free
system performance? The answer is likely somewhere in
the middle of these two extremes and different for each
system and situation. This paper provides a review of
the existing literature covering control schemes and
parameters that determine system performance. It at-
tempts to help answer the questions “How can we min-
imize human error while still maximizing system per-
formance?” and “What is the right human–machine
mix?” © 2005 American Institute of Chemical Engineers
Process Saf Prog 24: 45–51, 2005
INTRODUCTION
Does automation of control systems in today’s in-
dustry help to reduce human error? Intuitively, one
might expect that if we engineered humans out of the
system, errors would decrease. This seems to be a
worthwhile goal. In fact, well-known management
consultant, Walter Bennis, says the factory of the future
will have only two employees, a human and a dog. The
human is there only to feed the dog and the dog is
there to bite the human if he or she touches any-
thing [1].
Human error is inevitable, so we may be tempted to
think like Mr. Bennis [2]. Although it may be appealing
to automate humans out of the system, humans do
© 2005 American Institute of Chemical Engineers
Process Safety Progress (Vol.24, No.1)
provide judgment, logic, experience, and opinions. As
a component in the system, we are interactive, variable,
and adaptable. We fill many roles because we can
adapt and specialize, but our natural variability makes
it possible for us to take actions that a system may not
be able to tolerate [3]. Therefore, our input is a “bless-
ing and a curse” [3] to those responsible for system
design or performance.
Human error is often implicated as a cause of or
contributor to process industry incidents that result in
injuries, fires, spills, unplanned equipment downtime,
and the like. Even with increasing automation, various
sources report, that between 50 and 90% of all indus-
trial incidents are caused by human error. It is difficult
to say what the real figure is because it depends on
one’s perspective. However, whatever your perspec-
tive, it can be reasonably well argued that a large
percentage of industrial incidents are contributed to or
caused by human error [4].
As technology improves and efficient, productive
output becomes necessary for financial survival, we are
inclined to automate control systems. However, there is
a cost to the growth in this phenomenon. Twenty-two
years ago, this author, while learning oil production
operations, spent much time in the field with experi-
enced first-line supervisors. It was impressive to watch
them in action. A supervisor would stop the truck upon
hearing something out of the ordinary (a hiss, an un-
familiar vibration). He would listen more closely, place
his hand on a pump or piping, and then radio mainte-
nance to request the repair of a leak, a bad order
bearing, or some other problem. These supervisors
relied on “sentient” knowledge (obtained from the
senses and experience—the concept of “gut feel” may
partially describe this) to operate the process. They had
a “feel” for the system. With today’s reliance on com-
puter-controlled automation, it is less likely that oper-
March 2005 45
Table 1. Important assumptions made in this review.
• Human error is inevitable [2].
• Under appropriate conditions, automation of
industrial system performance is an accepted
means to reduce human error and its impact.
• Humans provide characteristics such as judgment,
flexibility, adaptability, experience, and sentient
knowledge (feel for the process) and are therefore
essential components in industrial systems.
• To achieve maximum system performance while
minimizing human error and risk to human
operators, system designers must fully understand
human physical, cognitive, and emotional
capacities and limitations and account for these in
their designs.
• Human errors and system risk can be minimized if
system designers incorporate known principles of
human–machine interaction and ensure humans
remain mentally engaged in system operation [5].
• System performance can be maximized if designers
incorporate into their designs optimized levels of
the strengths of each of the human and machine
components in the system [6].
ators will develop this same level of sentient knowl-
edge. To maximize system performance, we must
properly consider the strengths and weaknesses of
both the automated control system and the human
operator. The designer must work with existing opti-
mization models built to consider the application as
well the human and machine variables to optimize
system performance. In assessing a human–machine
system, one must account for human variability; thus,
important assumptions must be made. The assump-
tions made to establish the context of this review paper
are shown in Table 1.
The strengths and weaknesses in the human–ma-
chine interface that will be considered in this review
paper are shown in Table 2.
WHY AUTOMATE A SYSTEM?
General
An automated system is thought to perform a func-
tion more efficiently, reliably, and accurately than a
human operator. There is also an expectation that the
automated control system can perform a function at a
lower cost than the operator can. Therefore, as tech-
nology advances and becomes more available, its use is
growing at a rapid rate [7]. There is little argument
against the efficiency, reliability, and accuracy of an
automated system.
Safety
With higher reliability, one may be justified in think-
ing an automated system is a safer system. System
failures and upsets often lead to injuries, loss of con-
tainment of toxic or flammable materials, or cata-
strophic rupture of equipment resulting in significant
damage to the surroundings. It may be argued that,
keeping the human out of the system, in a sense, is
46 March 2005
protecting the operator from him/herself and is thus
improving the safety of the system. Therefore, even
though economics has been a primary driving force in
the development and increase in automation in recent
years, it could be argued that automating a system will
provide a higher level of system safety.
Time Savings and Efficiency
One might automate a system to relieve humans of
time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks [7], to speed
the operation, to increase production rates, to extend
an operation to a longer shift or even to continuous
production, to reduce system inefficiency, or to ensure
physical specifications are maintained and consistent.
Automated systems can also free up the operator’s
resources to allow him/her the time and opportunity
for long-range planning or decision making [8].
WHY ACTIVELY ENGAGE HUMANS IN SYSTEM PERFORMANCE?
To answer this question, we should first explore the
role humans play in modern production systems. Al-
though the decision to automate today’s complex pro-
duction systems seems inarguable, humans remain a
critical component. Humans are more flexible, adapt-
able, and creative than a fully automatic system and
humans are better able to respond to changes or un-
foreseen conditions [7]. In a process plant, this adapted
response may often be necessary. Humans often con-
tribute a supervisory role to the process; however, it is
difficult to know to what level supervisory responsibil-
ity is required [8]. Humans still provide system intelli-
gence, planning, creative thinking, and decision mak-
ing. However, other higher cognitive functions are
being explored (artificial intelligence and neural net-
works) for assignment to higher-order machines, and
although this is true, it should be noted that humans
still provide these functions better and more com-
pletely than machines [7].
Because automated systems are designed by hu-
mans, they are subject to human limitations. For exam-
ple, it is not possible for the designer to foresee, plan
for, and design an automated response for every pos-
sible situation that may arise in complex plant opera-
tions. Therefore, the best the designer has to hope for
is to understand the systems operating environment
well enough to design in as many responses as possi-
ble. Then the system designer must integrate the hu-
man operator into the system to an adequate level to
provide the necessary judgment and flexibility to im-
plement adapted responses as the unforeseen events
present themselves. This is where the challenge to the
designer lies. It is difficult to integrate humans into a
system. Human are driven by ambition and emotion
and are subject to inconsistencies and forgetfulness.
Humans allow cognitive functions to disengage with-
out realizing it. We switch from “habits of mind” to
“active thinking” and back again several times through-
out the workday. It is difficult to tell what triggers and
motivates the switch [9]. It is known that, in general, the
more humans remain engaged in the process, the more
likely they will maintain the “active thinking mode.”
System designers should seek to maintain an operator’s
“active thinking mode” as he or she decides what to
Process Safety Progress (Vol.24, No.1)
Table 2. Machine and human strengths and weaknesses.
Human
Strengths Weaknesses
Can apply judgment Inconsistent
Adaptable Subject to errors
Can apply sentient Unpredictable and
knowledge possibly unreliable
Interactive Subject to emotion and
motivations
Table 3. Human roles in an automated system.
Acknowledge control system signals (no change to
process)
Acknowledge control system signals (make required
changes)
Record data and instrument readings and adjust as
needed
Monitor system status and override as necessary
Monitor system status and report findings with no
change
automate, and to what level. Unfortunately, increasing
automation tends to promote the likelihood switching
to “habits of mind” [9]. To maximize system perfor-
mance, research indicates the need to take advantage
of the human and the control system strengths and then
to create effective and active communication between
them [10]. Table 3 shows the possible roles that the
human operator can fill in a human–machine system.
HOW SHOULD AN ENGINEER INTEGRATE THE HUMAN AND
AUTOMATED COMPONENTS?
Although human error may be caused by, among
other things, the work environment, research shows
that it is nonetheless inevitable [2]. Although minimiz-
ing human error is not the only reason for automating
a system, it is one of a number of the driving forces.
Before determining how and to what level an engineer/
designer should automate a system, it is necessary to
present what “automation” means in the context of this
article. One author defines automation as the execution
by a machine agent (usually a computer) of a function
that was previously carried out by a human. They
explain that given this definition, what is currently
considered “automation” will change over time [7].
A fear that workers have had in the past is that
automated systems are meant to replace them. This fear
may have been encouraged by the computer system
“Hal” in the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey. Automation
is not intended to remove the human; it merely changes
the nature of the role from one of doer to one of
overseer [7]. The operator manages the human–ma-
chine interface to keep system performance high [8]. A
problem occurs, however, when the designer does not
fully consider the ways in which the human role is
changed by the automation. Unintended or unantici-
Process Safety Progress (Vol.24, No.1)
Machine
Strengths Weaknesses
Consistent No judgment
Predictable Cannot be programmed for all
eventualities
Efficient No sentient knowledge
Uniform and Constrained by human limitations
reliable in design, installation, and use
pated human responses result when the designer has
not adequately thought through all potential responses.
Given this, it appears that an optimized system that
maximizes performance and minimizes human errors
will dynamically operate somewhere between full au-
tomation and complete manual control. Where on this
continuum, a system should operate, depends on the
application. Whatever the application though, to max-
imize system performance, a designer should maximize
the need for and use of what machines do best: accu-
rate, consistent, fast, continuous, economic operation.
To ensure minimized human error, a designer must
integrate human input into the system in such a way
that the operator stays mentally and physically en-
gaged. As a “manager” of the interface, the operator
should have a monitoring role with override capabili-
ties, receive adequate system status feedback with
enough time to respond, and trust system accuracy and
reliability [11]. This is a tall order and different for each
system. Often, the level of interaction between the
operators and the control system develops over time.
As personnel, training, and experience change over
time, the human input will change. An experienced,
well-trained operator can become bored and less vigi-
lant as he or she learns the system. Less vigilance often
means more errors of omission in the process. This
phenomenon is not fully in the control of the system
designer.
An engineer must have an understanding not only of
how the automation hardware and software operates,
he or she must also understand the inner workings of
the human operator; physical, mental, motivational,
emotional, training level, experience level, and the like.
Often, an engineer will automate a system to a level
that maximizes economic benefit, but then, almost as
an afterthought, leaves the human operator to manage
the system as best he or she can [7]. This can lead to
increased errors, upsets, injuries, fires, and spills, for
example. The idea of allocating tasks between humans
and machines within the context of a complex system
is referred to as function allocation [6]. It is critical to
safe operation that designers carefully consider func-
tion allocation. Decisions related to task allocation
among humans and between humans and machines
are design-based decisions [6]. Because there are so
many variables involved and their interrelationships are
complex, it is expected that optimization of these vari-
March 2005 47
ables is desirable and should result in better overall
system performance [6].
Because designers are not able to “program in” all
possibilities, they tend to integrate humans into the
system, as a supervisor or monitor. This sometimes
puts the operator in a position of having to respond to
an action already taken by the system. The operator
then has to respond on the system’s terms. Under these
terms, the operator is in a “catch-up” mode and at a
disadvantage in terms of heading off an incident [7].
Unfortunately, sometimes designers give the operator
override capabilities and room for discretion, without
providing adequate feedback about the system’s inten-
tions or actions soon enough to allow them to take
correct or complete actions to avoid system upset or
incident. In the airplane cockpit as well as the process
plant control room, visual, auditory, and tactile feed-
back is necessary [11].
The full potential of the automated system cannot be
realized if the human operator makes errors that bring
the system down. This issue was addressed above, but
human input can and will have an effect on system
performance. Human performance variables, such as
adaptability, judgment, future-planning ability and cre-
ativity, must be quantified and integrated into a design.
Application of the concept of a dynamic system of task
allocation is required in the design of complex systems
and no one design fits all systems [6]. This is the cog-
nitive human factors version of the adjustable-height
office chair [6]. The system should be designed to allow
dynamic and variable levels of task allocation between
operator and machine. This puts design and operation
decision making in the hands of the human again,
however, and issues such as training (may be man-
dated), experience (may be difficult to quantify), bias
(may be unavoidable), for instance, must be consid-
ered when personnel selection decisions are made. In
day-to-day process plant operations, realistically, these
selection decisions may not be possible. Problems can
arise when the human “on the shop floor” makes de-
cisions as to how much input he or she will provide to
the control system today. Problems associated with this
will be discussed later in this paper, but these may be
questions for future research.
Many industry people are familiar with the phenom-
enon of operators circumventing the automated com-
ponent of a system [8]. They may circumvent the auto-
mation system because the system makes their work
more difficult or time consuming. An automation sys-
tem malfunction also creates problems in the human–
machine interface. For example, if an operator is
charged with filling a vessel with liquid product and
that vessel is equipped with an automated level control
system and alarm, he or she may be tempted to open
the fill valve and leave the site to do other work while
the vessel fills. If the control system fails and the tank
overfills, chances are that human error will be cited as
the cause. If this system were manual only, the operator
would probably open the fill valve and stand by for the
entire fill time. This is time consuming and tedious, let
alone the fact that it idles an operator who could be
doing other productive work. If the system were com-
pletely automated, the filling operation could take
48 March 2005
Table 4. Inventory analysis of production and
landfill.
Ease of use of the system by the operator
Type of automation and type of feedback to the
operator
Frequency and perceptibility of operational feedback
Level to which the operator is kept mentally or
physically engaged
Ease of switching the control system from automatic
to manual and the system reliability
Source: DeKock [13], Sarka and Pukkila [14], Pukkila
[15], and Molloy and Parasuraman [16].
place without human intervention and the operator
would be free to work on other productive activity.
However, now the operator is no longer engaged,
physically or mentally, and it is likely that the operator
would not follow this operation very closely [12]. This
can result in the problem of overreliance. The operator
completely relies on the control system and does not
respond to a pending overfill or upset. However, if the
fill system malfunctioned, the operator would then
learn not to trust it. This could cause the opposite
problem of underreliance and result in an operator
potentially forgetting to close the fill valve and overfill-
ing the tank.
Given this dilemma, the appropriate level of auto-
mation for an operating system must be properly de-
signed into the system. This depends on who the sys-
tem is being designed for. It may be age dependent,
training level dependent, or technological savvy de-
pendent. To address this issue, the designer has a
number of considerations and it is assumed that suc-
cessful consideration of design variables can result in
higher productivity and fewer errors (Table 4).
An early traditional approach to automating a system
is one in which either the operator or the machine has
full control of the system at any one time. It was a
manual switch between automatic and manual control
[7, 17]. Today’s systems, however, have become in-
creasingly complex and in some cases, the functions
can be performed adequately by either the human
operator or the automated system. There are also a
number of functions requiring the attention of both at
the same time. This requires task-allocation decisions
to be made by the system designer with input from the
system operators [5]. The system designer must con-
sider each function or task to be performed by the
system and then must determine whether the human or
the automated system or both should be given control.
The designer must also consider whether the human
operator should be able to switch easily between au-
tomatic and manual control, whether the human oper-
ator should be able to override automatic control, and
how he or she will be alerted when the switch is
necessary.
Communication and coordination between operator
and system are critical. This is important in situations
where the operator and the automated systems share
Process Safety Progress (Vol.24, No.1)
control, such as in today’s complex flight systems or
pharmaceutical processes [10]. If the operator cannot
easily tell when a change is required or that the system
has become disengaged or is no longer functioning,
problems arise and errors are made. This potential
problem was evident when Eastern Airlines flight 401
crashed in the Florida Everglades in the early 1970s.
The pilots failed to recognize that the autopilot became
disengaged while they were distracted by a faulty in-
dicator light [16]. The crew became preoccupied with
an inoperative landing gear indicator light. They placed
the aircraft on automatic pilot and set the altitude for
2000 feet while they addressed the landing gear. When
the automatic pilot system accidentally became disen-
gaged, no one recognized it (the alarm sound was
obscured by cockpit discussion) and the plane contin-
ued to fly on manual control without human input. It
gradually lost altitude until it contacted the ground,
killing almost everyone onboard. This is also illustrated
in long wall mines when an operator is surprised by
movement of a long wall shield. If the operator is
unaware of the shield’s operating cycle status or is
preoccupied, he or she may position him/herself inside
the shield’s operating envelope and range of motion
[18]. In each of these cases, it is acceptable to switch
between automatic control and manual control, but the
operators must be made aware that the switch is nec-
essary or has already occurred.
There is much to consider (much more than shown
here) and many variables associated with each of these
considerations [5]. More research is needed to develop
an improved design model that can be used to help
process-plant control-system designers with these de-
cisions.
WHAT CAN GO WRONG IN AN AUTOMATED SYSTEM?
General
One definition of human error is: “human error con-
sists of any significant deviation from a previously es-
tablished, required or expected standard of human
performance” [19, 20]. There are other definitions, but
from the perspective of designing, operating, and
maintaining an industrial system, this provides a work-
ing foundation. When humans make errors and cause a
system to fail, it usually does not fail as the result of any
one reason [19]. It usually fails because of the human–
machine interface decisions the designer made, the
kinds of people operating the system, the amount of
training operators received, and the level to which they
are physically or mentally able to cope with the system
and its changes. System failure can be a function of
operating procedures provided for the people or the
environment in which they are working [21]. It is im-
portant to recognize that most human errors are not
made because people are not intelligent or that they are
wrong [19]. They commit errors because, in the heat of
the moment, they make decisions and take actions that
seem logical, given the situations and systems in which
they are operating. Errors are “caused” [19]. Human
actions are taken based on, among other things, infor-
mation provided by the automation system.
Process Safety Progress (Vol.24, No.1)
Trust and Reliance
Once a designer has created a system in which the
operator remains engaged, he or she must be sure that
the hardware remains reliable and that malfunction is
minimized. An important component in the human–
machine system is “trust.” The operator has to be able
to trust the automation to be accurate, functional, reli-
able, and consistent. Once the operator sees that the
hardware is not accurate or subject to malfunction, the
trust vanishes and the operator begins to underrely on
the automation [8]. This means he or she may circum-
vent or disable the automation and rely too heavily on
his or her own manual input. The safety, risk, and
error-reducing benefits of the automation are then lost
[7, 16]. With a level alarm controller that is subject to
frequent spurious trips and false alarms, operators
learn to either disconnect the alarm, acknowledge it
and not respond, or switch to complete manual oper-
ation and risk forgetting to close the fill valve and
overfilling the vessel.
The opposite of this phenomenon is also a problem.
If the system is designed to minimize human input and
it is known to be accurate and reliable, the operator
may be more likely to switch to the “habits of mind”
mode and may tend to overrely on the automation [7,
9]. The operator then does not allocate any attention to
the system as he or she is counting on the automation
to take care of everything. A common joke around an
oil refinery is to ponder the question—“If everyone just
walked away and left the refinery to function on its
own, how long would it continue to operate before it
experienced either a complete shut down or a cata-
strophic event?” Thankfully, the answer to this question
has not been determined experimentally, but it would
probably be, “not long.” An example of overreliance on
an automated system would be the Eastern Airlines
flight 401 (discussed earlier), which crashed in the
Florida Everglades. There were a number of problems
as the pilots received inadequate feedback or alarm
that the automated pilot became disengaged [11], but
the biggest problem came in that the pilots overrelied
on the automatic pilot [16].
Feedback
One way to help keep an operator cognitively en-
gaged is to provide accurate and understandable feed-
back about system status and mode. If the operator
understands the system’s status, he or she is in a much
better position to respond to upset conditions [22]. This
feedback has to be provided in a timely manner and be
delivered such that the human operator is not over-
whelmed. In one refinery case, a furnace explosion
occurred after the high-temperature detection and
alarm system malfunctioned, allowing the furnace
tubes to overheat and rupture. A large volume of flam-
mable liquid spilled into the firebox and ignited. The
rapid combustion catastrophically ruptured the firebox.
While this was happening, the operator received over
300 alarms in less than 5 min. Under these conditions,
human error is inevitable. Engaging operators in the
automation system can be done by requiring manual
data recording during the process and expecting an
analysis and manual trending of the process data.
March 2005 49
There are a number of ways to engage operators, but
care must be taken to ensure the expected operator
activity is real and necessary. We learn fast whether our
actions are important, necessary, valued, and integral
to the process.
As mentioned above, designers tend to automate a
system with economic benefit being the driving force
for determining which aspects will be automated and
how. They then integrate the human into the system
“after the fact,” leaving him or her to manage the results
of the automation [7]. This approach can work pro-
vided the designer considers issues such as perfor-
mance feedback, the level of operator training and
experience, the level to which the automation allows
the operator to remain mentally engaged, and the
speed at which the operator must respond to the feed-
back [11, 12]. Automated systems designers, in general,
have not yet adequately considered these performance
and training variables and have not integrated, system-
atically and fully, these human variables into process
industry systems. Several accidents outside the process
industry have illustrated this improvement opportunity.
Airplanes operating on automatic pilot were flown into
terrain and rail cars operating with speed constraints
derailed because of high speed [7]. There may be a
“disconnect” between automated system designers and
human operators. System designers must work closely
with the operators using their designed system.
Use, Abuse, Misuse, Disuse
Incidents involving automated systems appear to
involve human operators abusing, disusing, or misus-
ing the automated components they are operating [7].
Misuse is defined as underreliance or overreliance on
the automated components. Underreliance, as noted
above, refers to an operator not relying on the auto-
mation when it is required or prudent. This is charac-
terized by an operator circumventing a storage vessel’s
level control system or disconnecting a turbine’s over-
speed trip mechanism to avoid an alarm. Overreliance
refers to an operator turning over the operation to the
control system and withdrawing his or her own valu-
able input to the system’s performance [7]. This could
be characterized by an operator leaving a job site and
allowing the flooded boot of a reflux drum to be
drained out on its own by the control system. Well-
known comic, Gary Larson showed in one of his Far
Side cartoons, the image of two airplane pilots, who
seemingly trusted their automated control system so
much that when they peered through an opening in the
clouds and saw a mountain goat standing there, asked
“What is that mountain goat doing way up here in this
cloud bank?” [23].
Sentient Knowledge
As the level of automation increases, operators may
be losing the sentient knowledge of the process that
they once had. There seems to be fewer and fewer
people who can tell, simply by smell, sound, and feel,
what is going wrong in a process. If our human oper-
ators are not able to tell that there is an impending
upset in the system, they will have to rely on the
automation to catch and quell a problem. At this stage,
50 March 2005
automation cannot be designed and built to account for
every possibility and we need our human operators to
make judgments, interpretations, and moves to prevent
incidents. Without the sentient knowledge that one
develops from experience and living with the system
and all of its faults, the risk of incident is higher. The
more automated a system becomes, the more overreli-
ant an operator may become and the more he or she
stays in the “habits of mind” mode and the less likely he
or she is to switch cognitive gears to “active thinking”
when needed [9].
Mathematical Modeling of the “Right Mix”
One of the first steps in a design process is to
develop and quantify system performance variables.
For most engineers, this is an every day part of the job.
In this case, however, most engineers are not trained to
understand, much less quantify, the human variables
associated with motivation, training, emotion, judg-
ment, flexibility, adaptability, fatigue, or boredom. En-
gineers must also account for the operator’s trust in the
system in terms of designing in maximum reliability [8].
To account for minimally available information, the
designer has to quantify system variables in terms of
human needs. More research is needed to aid in this
quantification. Once this is complete, an optimization
function must be built from an understanding of the
mathematical relationship between these variables and
system performance. Although flight systems have
been thoroughly studied, more research is needed to
understand this mathematical relationship in process
plant applications. A generalized optimization function
model may follow this format:
max Y ⫽ A1 ⫹ A2· · ·An ⫹ H1 ⫹ H2 ⫹ · · ·Hn
s.t. Y ⬎ 0
min E ⫽ H1 ⫹ H2 ⫹ · · ·Hn
s.t. E ⬎ 0
where Y is the overall system performance, A repre-
sents the automation variables, H represents human
variables, and E represents errors.
The modeling concept is not new, but a challenge
still remains— defining the appropriate variables and
quantifying them appropriately for use in the model is
difficult. This is still somewhat undeveloped territory
and so far involves much subjective thinking. In many
cases, engineers consider the human operator as an
afterthought who must align with the system or be left
to struggle with it [7]. More research is needed such that
system designers, operators, and human factors engi-
neers study jointly, the human–machine interface in the
chemical process plant.
CONCLUSIONS
Mr. Bennis’s slightly exaggerated, slightly real por-
trayal of the factory of the future may never come.
There are many who hope it does not, and rightly so.
Humans provide valuable input to any system and it
Process Safety Progress (Vol.24, No.1)
should be a goal of every system designer to maximize
that input to take advantage of our judgment, flexibil-
ity, experience, adaptability, and motivation. At the
same time, the engineer must maximize system perfor-
mance by relying on automation to cover for our inat-
tentiveness, inconsistencies, lack of endurance, lack of
vigilance, and all of our physical and cognitive limita-
tions. Although automated flight systems have under-
gone extensive study, more research is needed in
chemical and hydrocarbon processing operations. We
need to understand better the relationship between
automation and human variables so that appropriate
quantification can be made to facilitate the design pro-
cess. More education of our engineering students is
needed in the area of human factors to achieve this
level of understanding in future designers of industrial
systems [24 –26].
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