A Human-Centered AI Task Management System for Cognitive Load Reduction and Decision Support in Industrial Plant Management

Abstract

Industrial plant management environments are becoming more complicated, with managers having to integrate production operations, maintenance activities, safety compliance, manpower allocation, and operational documentation across many digital platforms. The extensive use of fragmented tools including spreadsheets, emails, dashboards, and calendars frequently results in information overload, an increased cognitive effort, and reactive decision making. To solve these issues, this article introduces AI TaskManager, a human-centered, AI-assisted task and workflow management system intended to aid plant managers in manufacturing and industrial settings. AI TaskManager was built with Google AI Studio, which allows for the rapid creation of a high-fidelity prototype without the need for traditional software development. The system supports important management workflows with natural-language interface and multimodal AI capabilities, such as AI-assisted task creation, automated budget estimation from structured data, technical drawing interpretation, and adaptive job prioritizing. These functions are combined into a single interface to improve situational awareness, minimize cognitive load, and maintain human decision authority. A usability and human performance evaluation was conducted with ten participants, including plant supervisors, engineering professionals, and graduate researchers with experience in operational task management. With an average job execution time of 2.4 minutes, a 93% task completion rate, and a 6% mistake rate, the findings show excellent system performance. The findings demonstrate that AI TaskManager effectively facilitates cognitive ergonomics, decision support, and human–AI collaboration in industrial plant management, underscoring the promise of human-centered AI systems to improve managerial performance and operational resilience.

Keywords: Human-centered AI, Cognitive Ergonomics, human–AI Interaction, Industrial Ergonomics, Decision Support Systems, AI Task Management

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007973