Enhancing the Total Ship Computing Environment Infrastructure Through UIML

This project addresses an operational need in the Navy to improve ship and weapon system affordability. Part of affordability is building software. The current method of designing, implementing and testing Human-Computer Interfaces (HCIs), and producing documentation for HCIs, requires coordinating the work of people with different skill sets and roles, using engineering tools that do not share their artifacts. The resulting inefficiencies provide opportunities for improvement that Harmonia’s software lifecycle management (SLM) tools address. Our tools act as a central hub, coordinating many artifacts from all roles (system engineers, requirements analysts, cognitive engineers/human factors experts, software developers, testing experts, and technical documentation developers) that influence the HCI. The purpose of this project is to advance the state of SLM with an HCI component, and reduce system costs by reducing the technology insertion time and cost of any new capabilities the Navy adds to any platform that requires human decisions. Funding will be used to dramatically reduce the system cost by coordination and synchronization of artifacts produced at various stages of the software lifecycle. The funding will also be used to maximize warfighter performance by reducing cognitive load, and thus achieve optimal manning by permitting proper design and implementation of HCIs.