Human Performance Contributions to Safety in Commercial Aviation

In the commercial aviation domain, large volumes of data are collected and analyzed on the failures and errors that result in infrequent incidents and accidents, but in the absence of data on behaviors that contribute to routine successful outcomes, safety management and system design decisions are based on a small sample of non- representative safety data. Analysis of aviation accident data suggests that human error is implicated in up to 80% of accidents, which has been used to justify future visions for aviation in which the roles of human operators are greatly diminished or eliminated in the interest of creating a safer aviation system. However, failure to fully consider the human contributions to successful system performance in civil aviation represents a significant and largely unrecognized risk when making policy decisions about human roles and responsibilities. Opportunities exist to leverage the vast amount of data that has already been collected, or could be easily obtained, to increase our understanding of human contributions to things going right in commercial aviation. The principal focus of this assessment was to identify current gaps and explore methods for identifying human success data generated by the aviation system, from personnel and within the supporting infrastructure

Smart manufacturing scheduling: A literature review

[EN] Within the scheduling framework, the potential of digital twin (DT) technology, based on virtualisation and intelligent algorithms to simulate and optimise manufacturing, enables an interaction with processes and modifies their course of action in time synchrony in the event of disruptive events. This is a valuable capability for automating scheduling and confers it autonomy. Automatic and autonomous scheduling management can be encouraged by promoting the elimination of disruptions due to the appearance of defects, regardless of their origin. Hence the zero-defect manufacturing (ZDM) management model oriented towards zero-disturbance and zero-disruption objectives has barely been studied. Both strategies combine the optimisation of production processes by implementing DTs and promoting ZDM objectives to facilitate the modelling of automatic and autonomous scheduling systems. In this context, this particular vision of the scheduling process is called smart manufacturing scheduling (SMS). The aim of this paper is to review the existing scientific literature on the scheduling problem that considers the DT technology approach and the ZDM model to achieve self-management and reduce or eliminate the need for human intervention. Specifically, 68 research articles were identified and analysed. The main results of this paper are to: (i) find methodological trends to approach SMS models, where three trends were identified; i.e. using DT technology and the ZDM model, utilising other enabling digital technologies and incorporating inherent SMS capabilities into scheduling; (ii) present the main SMS alignment axes of each methodological trend; (iii) provide a map to classify the literature that comes the closest to the SMS concept; (iv) discuss the main findings and research gaps identified by this study. Finally, managerial implications and opportunities for further research are identified.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities project entitled 'Optimisation of zero-defects production technologies enabling supply chains 4.0 (CADS4.0) ' (RTI2018-101344-B-I00) , the European Union H2020 research and innovation programme with grant agreement No. 825631 "Zero Defect Manufacturing Platform (ZDMP) " and the European Union H2020 research and innovation programme with agreement No. 958205 "In-dustrial Data Services for Quality Control in Smart Manufacturing (i4Q) ".Serrano-Ruiz, JC.; Mula, J.; Poler, R. (2021). Smart manufacturing scheduling: A literature review. Journal of Manufacturing Systems. 61:265-287. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmsy.2021.09.0112652876

How do governments cope with austerity? The roles of accounting in shaping governmental financial resilience

Purpose: Studies on how accounting is involved in financial crises and austerity are limited. The context of austerity provides an interesting opportunity to explore the role of accounting in shaping governmental financial resilience, i.e. the capacity of governments to cope with shocks affecting their financial conditions. Design/methodology/approach: Based on a multiple case analysis of eight Italian municipalities, this paper explores how accounting contributes to the government capacities which are used to anticipate and respond to shocks affecting public finances. Findings: Municipalities cope with financial shocks differently; accounting can support self–regulation and can affect internally-led or externally-led adaptation. Different combinations of anticipatory and coping capacities lead to different responses to shocks. Practical implications: The findings can be useful for public managers, policymakers and oversight bodies for strengthening governmental financial resilience in the face of crises and austerity. Originality/value: The results provide evidence of the conditions, contexts, processes under which accounting becomes a medium which can support both anticipation of and coping with financial shocks, supporting cuts in some cases and resistance in the short run or driving long-term changes intended to maintain public services as much intact as possible. This highlights the existence of different patterns of governmental financial resilience and thus indicates ways of best preserving the service of the public interest

Operator Scheduling Strategies in Supervisory Control of Multiple UAVs

The application of network centric operations to time-constrained command and control environments will mean that human operators will be increasingly responsible for multiple simultaneous supervisory control tasks. One such futuristic application will be the control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by a single operator. To achieve such performance in complex, time critical, and high risk settings, automated systems will be required both to guarantee rapid system response as well as manageable workload for operators. Through the development of a simulation test bed for human supervisory control of multiple independent UAVs by a single operator, this paper presents recent efforts to investigate workload mitigation strategies as a function of increasing automation. A humanin- the-loop experiment revealed that under low workload conditions, operators’ cognitive strategies were relatively robust across increasing levels of automated decision support. However, when provided with explicit automated recommendations and with the ability to negotiate with external agencies for delays in arrival times for targets, operators inappropriately fixated on the need to globally optimize their schedules. In addition, without explicit visual representation of uncertainty, operators tended to treated all probabilities uniformly. This study also revealed that operators that reached cognitive saturation adapted two very distinct management strategies, which led to varying degrees of success. Lastly, operators with management-by-exception decision support exhibited evidence of automation bias.This research was sponsored by Boeing Phantom Works

Multi-Agent Narrative Experience Management as Story Graph Pruning

In this thesis I describe a method where an experience manager chooses actions for non-player characters (NPCs) in intelligent interactive narratives through story graph representation and pruning. The space of all stories can be represented as a story graph where nodes are states and edges are actions. By shaping the domain as a story graph, experience manager decisions can be made by pruning edges. Starting with a full graph, I apply a set of pruning strategies that will allow the narrative to be finishable, NPCs to act believably, and the player to be responsible for how the story unfolds. By never pruning player actions, the experience manager can accommodate any player choice. This experience management technique was first implemented on a training simulation, where participants’ performance improved over repeated sessions. This technique was also employed on an adventure game where players generally found the NPCs’ behaviors to be more believable than the control

Goal Reasoning: Papers from the ACS Workshop

This technical report contains the 14 accepted papers presented at the Workshop on Goal Reasoning, which was held as part of the 2015 Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems (ACS-15) in Atlanta, Georgia on 28 May 2015. This is the fourth in a series of workshops related to this topic, the first of which was the AAAI-10 Workshop on Goal-Directed Autonomy; the second was the Self-Motivated Agents (SeMoA) Workshop, held at Lehigh University in November 2012; and the third was the Goal Reasoning Workshop at ACS-13 in Baltimore, Maryland in December 2013

European local authorities’ financial resilience in the face of austerity: a comparison across Austria, Italy and England

European local authorities have been particularly stricken by the current context of decline and cutback management, and represent an ideal place where to study how governments respond to shocks affecting their financial conditions and management. Along these lines, this paper adopt the perspective of financial resilience for looking at the current context of austerity, and related responses, by shedding new lights on the role of internal capacities and conditions in influencing such responses and, ultimately, performance. Through a multiple case study analysis based on 12 European local authorities in Austria, Italy and England, the paper identifies the main shocks perceived by local management, the related short-term and long-term responses, highlighting the dynamics of financial vulnerabilty, awareness, anticipatory capacity, flexibility and recovery ability (ie, financial resilience) in its interaction with the external context and shocks. From the analysis, four patterns of resilience emerge: pro-active resilience, adaptive resilience, passive/fatalist resilience, complacent resilience