From: Peter B. Ladkin (ladkin(at)rvs.uni-bielefeld.de)
Date: Tue 19 Nov 2002 - 11:38:49 GMT
Although the "supervisory" role has its disadvantages, there are other ways to deploy humans, and multiple humans to enhance reliability. La Porte and various others found out through a study of highly-reliable systems (US Naval peacetime carrier ops, PG&E nuclear ops, amongst others) that one characteristic was multiple independent checks of safety-critical ops. For example, as I recall (I hope correctly), on the carrier, three people checked the correct installation of the aircraft nosewheel on the catapult, and those three belonged to different chains of command (up to a certain point). PBL -- Peter B. Ladkin PhD FBCS CW(hon) Professor of Computer Networks and Distributed Systems, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany Tel (Vx/msg/Fax) +49 (0)521 880 7319 http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de