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Virtuality would seem to offer certain advantages for human supervisory control. First, it could provide a physical analogue of the 'real world' environment. Second, it does not require control room engineers to be in the same place as each other. In order to investigate these issues, a low-fidelity simulation of an energy distribution network was developed. The main aims of the research were to assess some of the psychological concerns associated with virtual environments. First, it may result in the social isolation of the people, and it may have dramatic effects upon the nature of the work. Second, a direct physical correspondence with the 'real world' may not best support human supervisory control activities. Experimental teams were asked to control an energy distribution network. Measures of team performance, group identity and core job characteristics were taken. In general terms, the results showed that teams working in the same location performed better than teams who were remote from one another.

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It was found that rotational stereoscopic fluoroscopy is feasible and is an effective way of portraying 3-D information using x-rays.

This paper reports a study into the Levels of Abstraction Hierarchy (LOAH) in two energy distribution teams. The original proposition for the LOAH was that it depicted five levels of system representation, working from functional purpose through to physical form to determine causes of a malfunction, or from physical form to functional purpose to determine the purpose of system function. The LOAH has been widely used throughout human supervisory control research to explain individual behaviour. The focus of this research is on the application the LOAH to human supervisory control teams in semi-automated 'intelligent' systems. A series of interviews were conducted in two energy distribution companies. The results of the study suggest that people in the teams are predominately operating at different levels of system representation, depending upon their role.Managerial personnel work at functional purpose and abstract function levels whereas operational personnel work at physical function and physical form levels. It is argued that both types of personnel are part of the wider distributed problem solving system, which includes both people and technology.KEYWORDS: Levels of Abstraction Hierarchy, Teams, Human Supervisory Control 1 IntroductionThe research literature has put forward the Levels of Abstraction Hierarchy (LOAH) as a description of five different levels of system representation (Rasmussen, 1983;. Studies have shown that these levels can be used to represent the decision space which is utilised by individuals in performing aspects of their task, shifting between the levels where appropriate (Vicente, 1999). The most persuasive arguments have been made by knowledge theorists (see Goodstein et. al., 1988) and empirical researchers (see Vicente, 1997;1999). Vicente, in particular, has demonstrated how experimental participants are able to perform process control tasks more effectively if they are presented with both functional and physical information about the system. This represents both end of the decision spectrum. Rasmussen has argued that this is because people need to work 'top-down' when seeking the purpose of functional requirements and 'bottom-up' when seeking causes of system problems.Many of the theoretical concepts in process control emanated from Rasmussen's work throughout the eighties (Rasmussen, 1983; classification was developed to assist system designers in better understanding human variability. Rasmussen intended to assist designers in building better interfaces, concluding that if system representation were more compatible with the operator's mental processes, there was greater likelihood of reducing human error and improving overall system performance (Goodstein, Andersen & Olsen, 1988). The approach has already been used to examine the roles of members of a nuclear power plant control team during different phases of operation (Gualtieri et al, 2000) and the respective roles of surgeon's and anaesthetist's in medicine (Hajdukiewicz et al, 2001). This research seeks to extend the analy...