Adaptive goal setting in tasks with multiple criteria

An interactive decision-aiding technique is developed to assist a human operator in selecting a satisfactory goal in a control task. An attainability set of a system is introduced as the set of all goals that the system can potentially achieve. The goal selection problem is modeled as a decision problem of exploration of the attainability set. Experiments demonstrating the advantages of the proposed technique in comparison with traditional control methods are described. It was found that the performance of subjects using the decision mode was consistently better than that of subjects using either the automatic or the manual modes. The failure rate was much smaller (nonexistent) when the subjects used the decision mode. All subjects explicitly confirmed that the decision mode was the best and the easiest mode of controlling the experimental system