CMU Talk: Human System Integration in the DoD: Challenges and Opportunities

Greg Zacharias (the talk link)

The ability of humans to cope with information processing demands has become a limiting factor on system performance, especially as systems have become more complex, layered with automation, and fielded in more demanding dynamic environments, all while the roles and responsibilities of the human operator have evolved in the face of greater computational and communications capabilities. The ability to successfully deal with these challenges has important implications not only for individual operator performance, but also for team performance, safety, organizational staffing requirements, and overall human-system effectiveness of large scale systems. This is especially true in the Department of Defense (DoD). To illustrate, we summarize a recent study conducted for the Air Force to assess the state of the art in applying Human Systems Integration (HSI) practices to modern weapons systems design and acquisition, and to recommend improvements in the overall process. We then provide a brief overview of Charles River Analytics (www.cra.com ) which has been providing HSI tools and services to the DoD since its inception in the mid 80’s, and describe some of our current design projects that attempt to address some of the critical information processing demands facing today’s soldier.