PaintShop: A MICROWORLD EXPERIMENT INVESTIGATING TEMPORAL DECISIONS IN A SUPERVISORY CONTROL TASK

This paper explores temporal aspects of control behavior in order to support the design of systems where functions can be allocated flexibly in time. Dynamic Function Scheduling, an extension of Dynamic Function Allocation approaches, highlights the role of temporal information and temporal reasoning in supervisory control decisions. The microworld experiment presented 30 participants with a supervisory control task where they had to monitor production in a simulated paint station, make strategic decisions about automatic or manual production, and handle faults. Independent variables were event rate, the knowledge of event rate information, the availability of an online progress indicator, and the cost of fault servicing. Results showed that knowledge of event rate information improved performance, but availability of an online progress indicator had no additional effect. Implications for the investigation of temporal control behavior are discussed.