FRAMEWORK AND HISTORY

In 1992 the European Communities have elaborated the notion of Anthropocentric Production Systems and proposed a number of actions to account for the place of human operators in complex industrial production systems.

In September 1994 was held in Luxembourg (Luxembourg) the First European Conference Cognitive Science in Industry.

This conference was the initiating step towards an European Brite-Euram project COMAPS (Cognitive Management of Anthropocentric Production Systems, BE 96 - 3941) that was handled from 1997 to 1999. This program was the first to be explicitly devoted to the taking into account of human and cognitive factors within production systems. It involved four firms and three academic partners.

In September 1999 was held in Brest (France) the first Human Centered Processes conference (HCP'99, which had the status of a Mini EURO Conference). The purpose of this conference was to gather Operational Researchers interested in discussing human centered approaches applied to complex industrial problems, industrialists faced to questions related to cognition and researchers who are expert in Cognitive Science. More than 20 different countries were represented in the conference.

A call for interest was done after the last HCP conference in 1999, and more than 40 people (from about 8 different European countries) answered positively. It may be planned to reach about 50 members in the group in the first year of HCP group's existence.

These events and programs have shown that the approach was now mature enough to launch a research initiative at European Level within the EURO (Association of European Operational Research Societies) framework.

Then a call for participation to HCP co-ordination board was done during the HCP sessions in EURO XVII in Budapest (July 2000), in order to make complete and official the co-ordinating board:

• Semi-plenary session: Human centered processes and decision support systems, Barthélemy J.P, Bisdorff R. and Coppin G. (Presentation in PowerPoint ).
• Session Human centered processes (Org.: Lenca P.): Conditional learning of expert's strategies from promising combination of aspects (Lépy N.); COMAPS: anthropocentric management of control strategies (Le Saux E.); On the roles of deviant logic and multiple hypotheses in professional judgment (Lundberg G.)