Human Intervention Point (HIP)

Scenarios

A device with an optical drive might require a specific disc to be inserted for a particular test. If this is needed very often, it is worth investing in a mechanical disc changer, but if this type of test is run infrequently it might be more efficient to manually change the discs. A human intervention point will tell the operator when a disc has to be changed.

Another use for the human intervention point would be if you have a mechanical disc changer, but it is not 100% reliable. If your setup can detect when the mechanical changer fails, the system can signal a HIP to alert the operator when the automatic disc change has failed.

Solution

A human intervention point is a way to draw the attention of a human operator when some kind of manual intervention has to take place during task execution. During a HIP task execution is suspended, so any resources in use by the task are not available for other tasks.

A human intervention point is useful if task execution can be mostly, but not fully, automated. For tasks of which very little can be automated, it might be better to execute them manually.

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