Human-Machine Patterns for System Design, Cooperation and Interaction in Socio-Cyber-Physical Systems: Introduction and General overview

With increasing autonomous capabilities and intelligence of machines and interconnectivity of humans and machines, interaction and cooperation become even more crucial for socio-cyber-physical systems. How can we organize the exploding number of design options in a way that it is easy for humans to understand and control these systems? Patterns for the design of interaction and cooperation could be the key for describing problems and generalizable solution patterns, which can be instantiated again in individual solutions. Modeling, matching and instantiating could be the fundamental use cases for those patterns. Understanding, designing, engineering and using are the essential activities in an interplay of researchers, designers, engineers and users of human-machine systems. A realistic dream is to have global databases of human-machine patterns and their effects so that the wheel does not have to be re-invented several times and common knowledge about patterns can be shared in our community.