Development of an ergonomic control panel layout system and its application

A control panel layout system was developed to generate an ergrnomically sound panel design. A constraint satisfaction concept was introduced as a framework of incorporating diverse ergonomic design guidelines into the panel layout. An efficient search algorithm which can find a constraint satisfaction solution within a reasonable time was developed based on preprocess and look ahead procedures with the backjumping technique. The proto- type panel layaout system was developed on a SPARC workstation. The constraint satisfaction algorithm was programmed in C language with Motif as a GUI tool under the X-windows environment. The effectiveness of the prototype paned layout system was examined by a case study.