The complexity of management by exception: Investigating cognitive demands and practitioner coping strategies in an envisioned air traffic world

In a variety of domains, advanced technology has allowed humans to become ever more remote supervisors of system activity. Monitoring processes that function increasingly autonomously, supervisors often seem required to manage their system by exception. This research investigates the complexity of managing highly autonomous systems by exception. It attempts to reveal some of the cognitive demands that are imposed on human practitioners who need to anticipate and adapt to problems in how other agents (human or machine) are handling a safety-critical process. The setting for this research is free flight: an envisioned aviation system aimed at giving air traffic controllers the role of "managers by exception". The complexity of management by exception as it may occur in this envisioned world was explored and charted through a variety of incident scenarios set in the future. Expert practitioners were taken on walkthroughs of these future incidents. Faced by a concrete situation of how the envisioned world might fail or be vulnerable, practitioners were compelled to confront and compare with one another their interpretations and perspectives of how to deal with difficult problems and constraints associated with management by exception in the envisioned world. Management by exception is an architecture where a manager must anticipate a mismatch in how he and his subordinate(s) interpret a problem or process. If this mismatch threatens any of the manager's system goals it is dealt with (cooperatively or not) by adapting the distribution of authority between manager and subordinate(s). Anticipation of problems, as well as determining how to redistribute authority in the face of their threat, turns out to consist of a series of difficult trade-off judgments. The manager must decide not only when to intervene during an evolving anomaly, but also how much authority to take away, and from how many of his subordinates.