The requirements on transportation systeins concern not only the quantitative and qualitative aspects of transportation activities, but also still more aspects of their reliability and safety. This concerns not only the transported subjects or goods, but also environment.
The losses caused by failures of transportation activities reach even now a very high level and, if they are not limited by systematic research and preventive activity, they will reach a quite tremendous level soon.
However, practically all the contemporary transportation vehicles, trains, ships and planes and also all the transportation systems need, for their proper operation, interaction with human beings who drive them, control them or use them and maintain them.
In spite of the fact that a significant progress was made in recent years as concerns the transportation systems automation; the fully automatic transportation system in use is still for-seen in considerably far future.
Analyzing the reliability and safety of transportation, one finds that the activity of human being is the weakest point. The technical reliability of almost all transportation tools hais improved quite a lot in recent years; however, the human subject interacting with them has not changed too much, as concerns his/her reliability and safety of the respective necessary interaction.
Therefore there is an urgent necessity to improve it, and possibilities how to increase it will stay more and more in the focus of our interest.
In this contribution, the overview of the related problems is being made and open problems for further research in this area are discussed.
There is common, rather empirically supported knowledge within the
body of the System Analysis that complex interfaces (for example “man - machirie” interface within the hybrid system, or synapse in the human brain) susceptibly react both on the dimension of the task (i.e.: the number / type / domain of interface parameters / markers), and the level of uncertainty. In order to quantitatively evaluate this effect, the overview of the different concepts of interface is done first. Then the problem is analyzed on the background of geometrical considerations.
The results of the study indicate that even a low degree of uncertainty has significantly adverse eífect on the interface regularity (consequently the reliability of systems processes, as well) if the dimension of the pertinent task is sufficiently high.
Practical implication of this result for systém analytics is straightforward - keeping the dimension of the task as low as possible. The interface dimension higher than 5 is in the majority of tasks with moderate uncertainty considerably unfavorable. This result imposes serious constrain to the systems identification.