Understanding automation transparency and its adaptive design implications in safety–critical systems

Abstract

Automation is designed to assist operators and enhance system performance and safety. When unexpected events occur, and the operator is not able to understand the behaviour of the automated system a sudden rise in cognitive workload occurs, compromising decision-making, performance, and safety. Automation transparency as a human-centric design principle is a potential intervention in the design of human-automation systems that can remedy these countereffects. Human-centricity of advanced automated systems is one of the focal areas of Industry 5.0 and automation transparency is a potential design principle that will become even more important in this new era. Thus, this concept must be well-understood, and its design implications must be highlighted. This understanding of the current state of automation transparency is important for entering a new era with more complex systems. The literature includes varied definition and approaches to transparency with mixed results on its influence on automation system design factors, making it hard to understand design implications. This paper addresses this need. This work stemmed from a broader systematic literature review and specifically zoomed in on the included literature that explicitly mentioned the terms ‘automation transparency’ and ‘transparency’ in their abstracts and filtered for these articles in Rayyan software. These articles were screened for full text relevance, being empirical papers, using qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods. Fourteen resulting articles were analysed, as representative exemplars of empirical and recent work in this field, to see how automation transparency is being understood, what is its significance in relation to other automation system design factors, and what are the design implications. The findings showed a progressive trend from the emphasis on static, high transparency towards an emphasis on human centred adaptive transparency and explainability which is aligned with the focus of Industry 5.0. Adaptive transparency design implications derived from the analysis are presented along with limitations of the current research and the future research implications.