Research: Determining what’s next: visual analytics for evaluating human-automation coordination
Abstract Supporting coordination between a human and their machine counterparts is essential for realizing the benefits of an automated system and maintaining system safety. In supervising the automation, the ability to answer question “what will happen next” given the system design is necessary for continuous coordination. If the human’s view of the world, the autonomous system’s activities, and the world are misaligned, automation surprises occur. We introduce the What’s Next diagram which can be used to visualize the ability of the human to coordinate with automated systems over time in both a retrospective and future-oriented manner. By analyzing the interplay between projection, retrojection, and events as they occur temporally, gaps in design can be recognized and mitigated. Two case studies are presented showing how to use and generate insights from this diagram in both manners, retrospective and future-oriented, with the latter supported by a computational-based analysis.