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Adapting plans in progress in distributed supervisory work: aspects of complexity, coupling, and control

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Abstract

Distributed supervisory control systems often rely on complex and centralized plans to cope with a variety of unanticipated situations. Replanning requires practitioners to forgo standard procedures in favor of making simple plans without simplifying, managing task coupling, and anticipating team needs to provide decentralized and elaborate plans. This article proposes a plan classification scheme to study what features of plans facilitate or hinder adaptation and a framework to examine how features of plans influence the cognitive processes of replanning. The plan features have been assigned to the categories of plan complexity, coupling, and control. Plans are task networks sharing similar features of complexity and coupling to technical systems. The proposed framework sets out to explore how plan features influence the processes of recognizing plan disruptions, reviewing challenges and different team stances, repairing plans to resolve new risks, and reacting by coordinating team efforts to execute plans. The framework draws on the Extended Control Model (ECOM) to integrate the four processes of replanning into a set of control loops. The benefits of this framework are illustrated in the context of operator training and decision support.

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  1. Department of Production Engineering and Management, Technical University of Crete, University Campus, 73100, Chania, Crete, Greece

    Tom Kontogiannis

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  1. Tom Kontogiannis
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Correspondence to Tom Kontogiannis.

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Kontogiannis, T. Adapting plans in progress in distributed supervisory work: aspects of complexity, coupling, and control. Cogn Tech Work 12, 103–118 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-010-0150-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-010-0150-7

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