MEASURES OF COMPLEXITY OF FAULT DIAGNOSIS TASKS.

The literature of complexity is reviewed and the distinction between perceptual complexity and problem solving complexity is discussed. Within the context of two particular fault diagnosis tasks, four measures of complexity are considered. These measures are evaluated using data from two previously reported experiments which employed eighty-eight subjects. It is shown that two particular measures of complexity, one based on information theory and the other based on the number of relevant relationships within the problem, are reasonably good predictors of human performance in fault diagnosis tasks.