MOS 6625 System Safety Engineering WK 5 Discusson

Course Textbook APA Citation:

Leveson, N. G. (2011). Engineering a safer world: Systems thinking applied to safety. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Discussion Board. 

Your textbook discusses the fact that few systems currently exist where statistical confidence for reliability with automation (computer/robotics) can be used effectively without human monitoring or control.

Bainbridge points out irony in the fact that often humans are employed to monitor a computer that is performing a control task, but that the human monitoring the system is being asked to monitor a computer that is providing the feedback to the human. Bainbridge poses the question of how the human monitoring the computer will know when the computer is wrong if the only information the human has comes from the computer.

Answer and discuss these two questions:

1. Your textbook poses the following question on page 277: "Who will have the final authority if the human and computer disagree about the proper control actions in a given system task?"

2. To what extent do you anticipate that computers (robotics) will perform take-off and landing of commercial transportation aircraft (completely automated like some trains and other people-moving systems)?