An architecture to support incremental automation of complex systems

Operators and domain practitioners often complain that automation is brittle, opaque, and 'not worth the effort' to use. This paper reviews automation problems and methods for the design of 'cognitive automation.' Cognitive automation is software intended to automate cognitive activities, such as situation assessment, monitoring, and fault management, that are currently performed by human operators. Limitations of current knowledge engineering methods-the key to robust cognitive automation-are presented. With this background, a design methodology and automation concept-incremental automation-are proposed. Incremental automation is software, which by design, serves as a cognitive apprentice to the operations staff of a complex dynamic system. Over time, as operations personnel refine and extend it, incremental automation accumulates knowledge that covers a broad range of operational experience. Furthermore, and again by design, the structure and processing used by incremental automation closely emulates structures and processes used by expert operators, thus facilitating software that is easy for domain practitioners, including operators, system designers, and management, to understand, repair, and enhance. APPRENTICE is the computational form of the methodology. This paper concludes with a description of an architecture to support incremental automation and its application in a NASA satellite ground control system.