An attempt for generic concepts toward human-machine cooperation

Previous works in human engineering and particularly in the air traffic control domain show three basic conditions for designing a cooperative decision support system: 1) sufficient know-how for solving problems in an autonomous way; 2) know how to cooperate and 3) adequate organizational structure integrating human and machine. Through a multi-disciplinary approach including cognitive psychology and human engineering research we discuss some basic concepts. The paper gives a definition for cooperation from works by psychologists:"two agents are cooperating if 1) each one strives towards goals and can interfere with the other (on goals, resources, procedures, etc.) and 2) each agent tries to detect and process such interferences to make the other's activities easier". Two generic structures, respectively called vertical (hierarchical) and horizontal (heterarchical), are presented. When evaluating these structures, we show that the choice of a cooperative structure is not sufficient for allowing a real cooperation between human and machine. Therefore, deriving K. Schmidt's (1991) typology of the cooperative forms and this definition, we specify the capabilities needed for managing interferences between goals (MI) and the capabilities for making other agents' goals easier (FG). We then transpose MI and FG to human-machine cooperative systems, taking into account technical limitations of artificial agents and constraints imposed by the natural structure of the human-machine organization.