Cooperative support for distributed supervisory control: Issues in modeling cooperative work in complex dynamic systems

Most supervisory control environments (e.g., process plants) require a team of controllers to coordinate their activities to successfully monitor and control the system. The authors discuss issues and modeling frameworks suitable for capturing activities in a distributed supervisory control situation. A cooperative operator model is considered which may be thought of as a heterarchic-hierarchic network of nodes that represent activities assigned to particular operator(s), where these activities may in turn be represented in the form of a decision ladder. The cooperative operator model is anticipated to form the basis for knowledge-based support systems in supervisory control. Potential features of such a system include a representation of the environment that is shared betweeen agents, management support for task allocation, and information management support for the exchange of communicative messages and data.<>