The Allocation of Functions in Systems

A systematic approach for allocating functions to humans and machines has been an elusive goal of human factors specialists for more than 30 years. The author has fortunately been able to obtain contract support for reviewing the earlier techniques and methods in the literature and deriving “lessons learned” to guide the development of the approach reported here. The approach is believed to be systematic and embedded in the overall system design process. This paper describes the systems approach to design and how the allocation of functions is a part of it, as a five-step procedure with four principal rules for arriving at a hypothetical allocation.