An interactive and iterative control panel layout

An interactive and iterative design method based on the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) technique was developed to generate an ergonomically sound layout of a control panel. This control panel layout method attempts to incorporate a variety of relevant ergonomic principles and design constraints, and generate an optimal or, at least, a "satisfactory" solution through iterative interactions with the designer. The existing panel design and layout methods are mostly based on the optimization of single objective function formulated to reflect and trade off all ergonomic design objectives which are largely different in their nature. In fact, the problem of seeking an ergonomically sound panel design should be viewed as a multiple objective optimization problem. Furthermore, most of the design objectives should be understood as constraints rather than objectives to be optimized. Hence, a constraint satisfaction approach is proposed in this study as a framework for the panel designer to search through the design decision space effectively and make various design decisions iteratively. In order to apply the constraint satisfaction approach to the panel design procedure, the ergonomic principles such as frequency-of-use, importance, functional grouping, and sequence-of-use are formalized as CSP terms. With this formalization, a prototype system was implemented and applied to panel layout problems. The results clearly showed the effectiveness of the proposed approach since it permits designers to consider and iteratively evaluate various design constraints and ergonomic principles, and, therefore, aids the panel designer to come up with an ergonomically sound control panel layout.