Besides carrying out certain tasks, if not all, to comply with the work objective, the operating force is the high-end decision component of the work system. This component determines and supervises what will happen in the course of the work process and which operation-supporting means will be deployed at which time. In other words, this work system component has got the highest authority level. It is only this component where the complete knowledge about the work objective is placed as well as the knowledge needed to understand and pursue the work objective effectively. Therefore, the operating force exclusively consists of operating units which have got the necessary cognitive capabilities to do this job or at least, in case of multiple operating units, to contribute to the pursuit of the work objective with it in view.
Thereby they exhibit the indispensable behavioural feature based on the knowledge mentioned to monitor the work process as a whole from their own perspective, subject to the work objective and the work plan agreed upon. The operating force is the only component in the work system containing a human element. It consists of at least one human individual. Already this makes this component very special. Traditionally, the operating force has been exclusively human. The human element as an autonomous entity warrants that the operating force can make use of this basic capacity to be principally capable, if wanted, to create or modify the work objective independent from any external agency. Therefore, we can claim that a work system is an autonomous system, in principal. This is not in contradiction with the fact that the work objective can come from a supervising external agency, too. For instance, without any further comment on the earlier work system example of a person swimming in a lake we would not hesitate to presume that this person has made up the work objective independently as an autonomous agent. However, although this is probably true, he or she could also have been instructed by a supervising agency, and even in this case the individual still would have the capacity, in principle, to modify the instructed objective or to create a new objective based on its own value judgement. This is one of the great strengths of the autonomous human operator, keeping in mind, though, that it can be a crucial weakness, too, in certain rare cases.
Everything has its price. The Titanic accident is a spectacular example to illustrate that the natural autonomy of the human operator in the work process can lead to a catastrophe. It was not a matter of loosing awareness of possible environmental threats. It was rather a matter of the governing personal desires of the people in charge. Thus, unfortunately, the work objective and the desires of the operating units have not to be automatically in coincidence in all cases. The operating force does not necessarily consist of just a single person. It might also be formed by a human operating team. The necessary condition to operate as a member of the operating team is to know enough about the work objective in order to understand and pursue it effectively, regardless of the fact that the individual capabilities may be different and may lie in different fields of expertise. Think of a medical team being the operating force in the surgery room. All team members as the operating units are human. All of them know about the work objective, but the individual capabilities of the surgeon compared to those of a surgery nurse are obviously very different. Still the whole team is engaged in collaboration, each member with a certain role, to meet the common work objective. This is an imperative and satisfactory property of any ordinary team member of the operating force. Traditionally, improvements of work system effectiveness and efficiency as far as the human operating force is concerned are so far only subject to selection, education, training, motivation and other issues related to human resources and performance improvement. However, at this point the question is reasonable whether to consider not only humans as team members. One main purpose of this article is to deal with that question that the operating force might be supplemented by artificial team members as a special case of co-operative automation.
One step further, one could theoretically think of an autonomous artificial system by replacing the human team members by artificial ones. With advancing technology, in theory a situation is imaginable where the human operator will completely be substituted by some automation, probably with human-like cognitive capabilities. The reduction of the human flight-deck crew of airliners about two decades ago is a good example for this tendency of substituting human manpower, although that was provided only by automation for task execution (e.g. flight management system). Regardless of the discussion, what kind of capabilities such automation might provide in the future, there is one crucial requirement to be fulfilled to refer to such a system as an autonomous system: It has to have the capability to independently assign the work objective on its own, just as the human operator in a work system is principally capable to do so. Such a system we call an autonomous system, having the capacity to operate in complete independence of other agencies, in particular independent of human ones. Theoretically, this seems to be a principally feasible engineering challenge.
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