Authority Management and Conflict Solving in Human-Machine Systems

This paper focuses on vehicle-embedded decision autonomy and the human operator’s role in so-called autonomous systems. Autonomy control and authority sharing are discussed, and the possible effects of authority conflicts on the human operator’s cognition and situation awareness are highlighted. As an illustration, an experiment conducted at ISAE (the French Aeronautical and Space Institute) shows that the occurrence of a conflict leads to a perseveration behavior and attentional tunneling of the operator. Formal methods are discussed to infer such attentional impairment from the monitoring of physiological and behavioral measures and some results are given.