Framework and methodologies of human-machine cooperation for the civil aircraft deck design

The civil flight deck is a complex socio-technical system, whose design is closely related with the flight safety. The crew-centered philosophy has made the design of the flight deck logical and consistent to some extent. Given existing problems in the application of the philosophy and corresponding theory and research results, the human-machine cooperation design framework is proposed in this paper. This framework regards the deck as a system comprised of the crew-agent and the machine-agent. For the cooperation between the two agents, three issues should be addressed, the agent roles and tasks allocation, the agent role switch, and the agent communication. Besides methodologies, principles and guidelines are also necessary for addressing them, named as “A-A”, “A-S”, and “A-C”. With this framework, the deck design can be carried out logically, and the application of design philosophy, concept and research results will become more credible. Besides these, some contradictions in the crew-centered philosophy can be successfully avoided and requirements for new kinds of agent cooperation instruments can be identified.