Systems Engineering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

15System Thinking Begins with Human Factors: Challenges for the 4th Industrial Revolution

Avi Harel

Synopsis

The 3rd industrial revolution (IR) brought us two new disciplines critical for system design: systems engineering (SE) and human factors (HF). In the 3rd IR, the two disciplines did not integrate very well, because both disciplines were system‐centric. This is changing in the 4th IR, with the emergence of system thinking. System thinking has two aspects. The internal aspect is about the collaboration between system components; the contextual aspect is about the interaction with the real world, namely the customers and stakeholders, as well as the operational constraints. System thinking is a two‐stage process, beginning with the contextual aspect, followed by the internal aspect. The role of HF is in the domain of contextual system thinking, namely of integrating people in complex systems. The framework recently established for relating the systems to the real world is human–machine interaction (HMI). This new transdisciplinary framework enables us to bridge the chasm between the two disciplines. A model of HMI design proposed here regards two distinct views of the user, corresponding to the two aspects of system thinking: as a system operator, the user corresponds to the contextual aspect, and as a system component, the user corresponds to the internal aspect. As a system operator, in contextual system thinking, we are concerned about the HMI. As a system component, in ...