Application of quality engineering to evaluate the effects of situation awareness and trust in automation system

The purpose of the paper is to study the performance of automatic control systems using quality engineering by robust design. A conceptual structure of the relationship between situation awareness (SA) and trust in automation and a model of automation system performance with relation to SA, trust and automation reliability are developed. Then a quality loss function to evaluate the effects of automation reliability, trust and SA on system performance is proposed. Afterwards a matrix and orthogonal experiment is conducted to verify the function specifically. The experimental results indicate: firstly, using quality characteristics and an objective function (S/N ratio) to measure the system performance is easy and objective and we can obtain the optimal system performance by the best combination of levels of the control factors. Secondly, the reliability of automation is the main contribution to system performance about 37%, but if the automation is in high reliability and the levels of the other control factors in the environment are not on par with the supervisor, SA and trust is inaccurate, the system performance will be poor and influenced greatly. The results of this study can be applied to human-machine interface design and selection of adapted operators in automation