Improving Safety by Learning from Automation in Transport Systems with a Focus on Sensemaking and Meaningful Human Control

Abstract

There is an increase in the use of automation and autonomous solutions within transportation. According to The Oxford Dictionaries, autonomy is the right or condition of self-government, and the freedom from external control or influence. This chapter emphasizes that autonomy does not necessarily mean absence of human interaction. Often there is a strong need to design how humans can make sense of automation failures and enact meaningful human control. An autonomous system can be a set of automated tasks, with interactions with several sub-systems and/or humans, with a specific degree/level of autonomy. The main issues across the domains are technical reliability and maturity, the need for automation transparency (including awareness for the decision made by automation), the need for defining what conditions the system can operate under and assigning responsibilities to human operators and the automation. Experiences from known accidents involving a high level of automation, as in the cases of Boeing 737 MAX, Uber and Tesla, have shown overreliance on automation and poor understanding of capabilities and limitations. Design principles from meaningful human control should be used to verify if the interaction between automation and the human is safe. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)