Impact of communication on systems dependability: human factors perspectives

摘要

Dependability of many complex and critical systems strongly relies on human operators, both through human reliability, and human ability to adequately handle unexpected events. This paper focuses on ergonomic field studies of air traffic control activites, and more specifically on the analyses of communication within teams of controllers. We show how operators spontaneously use the natural redundancy and diversity of human communication (multimodality, addressing characteristics, ...), so as to successfully maintain mutual awareness. This is the key for reliable cooperation, for the sake of global system dependability which rests on mechanisms such as error detection, recovery, and prevention (by anticipation and regulation). This study helps providing specifications for the design of systems efficiently supporting both human cooperation, and human ability to contribute to dependability.