Recent, highly advanced artifact systems make it more complex and unpredict
able to understand how they are used by human under a particular situation.
Disastrous errors would occur when the methods of interactions deviate fro
m what are expected at the design stage by the designer, who is different f
rom the user. This paper presents a method by which human dynamic interacti
ons with the externally provided tasks can be simulated. We concentrate on
the resource-bounded human situation awareness, which is a complex phenomen
on occurring at the interface between the human internal cognitive processe
s and the external environment. Finally, this is applied to the analysis of
the high-tech aircraft accident that occurred in Columbia in 1995, which i
s a well-known accident caused by the discoordination between the human and
the automated aircraft. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.