The hierarchical modeling of human planning activities with affordances using finite state automata (FSA)

Control of human-centered systems has increasingly been becoming more challenging because roles of humans are recognized as one of critical aspects in complex systems. Motivated by this, this paper presents a framework for modeling a human-involved complex system, which incorporates the concept of affordances. The formalism for human-involved systems is developed based on automata theory and Turvey's definition of affordance. The structure of the formal model is based on a hierarchical modeling concept which combines several atomic models and defines the granularity of states in systems. We consider two four levels of grains to represent human actions. The model is composed of system level (planning level) automata and sub-automata (perception level) associated with properties of human capabilities (effectivities) and system preconditions (affordances). The hierarchical FSA modeling framework could be used to provide the information of system complexity in human-involved systems with human planning activities.