Many tasks require a human operator to make a choice between emphasizing task accuracy or task completion time. At an elementary task level, this tradeoff concept is not new, and has been studied at some depth by psychologists. This paper suggests using a multiple criteria optimization (MCO) problem formulation to model and analyze the accuracy/completion time tradeoff at a more complex task level.

A brief description of the accuracy:completion time tradeoff literature is given. Application of the MCO problem formulation to human-system interaction is then provided. Finally, an experiment is described that produced data that was analyzed using the proposed MCO problem formulation.