Modern production systems are becoming more and more complex to comply with diversified market needs, flexible production and competitiveness. Despite technological progress, the presence of human operators is still fundamental in production plants, since they have the important role of supervising and monitoring processes, by interacting with such complex machines. The complexity of machines implies an increased complexity of human-machine interfaces (HMIs), which are the main point of contact between the operator and the machine. Thus, HMIs cannot be considered anymore an accessory to the machine and their improvement has become an important part of the design of the whole machines, to enable a non stressful interaction and make them easy to use also to less skilled operators. In this paper, we present a general framework for the design of HMIs that adapt to the skills and capabilities of the operator, with the ultimate aim of enabling a smooth and efficient interaction and improving user's situation awareness. Adaptation is achieved considering three different levels: perception (i.e., how information is presented), cognition (i.e., what information is presented), and interaction (i.e., how interaction is enabled). For each level, general guidelines for adaptation are provided, thus defining a meta-HMI independent of the application. Finally, a couple of examples of how the proposed adaptation patterns can be applied to the case of procedural and extraordinary maintenance tasks are presented.
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Modern production systems are becoming more and more complex to comply with diversified market needs, flexible production and competitiveness. Despite technological progress, the presence of human operators is still fundamental in production plants, since they have the important role of supervising and monitoring processes, by interacting with such complex machines. The complexity of machines implies an increased complexity of human-machine interfaces (HMIs), which are the main point of contact...
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