Developing a novel operator performance measure for procedural tasks based on safety-II perspective

This paper proposes a novel framework to evaluate procedural task performance from a Safety-II perspective. While deviations from procedural steps have been a major focus of Safety-I approach, the novel framework aims to capture human operators’ adaptive behaviors and efforts in accomplishing higher-level goals. By adopting abstraction hierarchy, four levels of goal hierarchy embedded in a procedure are modeled: System, operation, task, and step. The current framework focuses on the relationship between task-level goals and step-level goals, given that a primary use of procedures occurs at a task level. Based on the framework, four types of procedural task performance are proposed: Type-I positive and negative outcomes, and Type-II positive and negative outcomes. Using the four types of outcome performance, novel quantitative measures to evaluate operators’ adaptive and maladaptive procedural performance are suggested. Challenges and work in progress associated with the proposed measurement are also presented.