System Engineering of Human Resources and Cognitive Task Analysis in Complex Navy Systems

The Navy faces the challenge of personnel reduction, combined with the need to expand the capabilities in time-critical strike, sustained littoral operations, ship over-the-horizon area defense, and information dominance. To meet the challenge, the Navy needs efficient system engineering methods to evaluate and optimize the design of large-scale complex real-time human-machine systems. This project will derive such methods from a novel biologically-grounded model of human operator. The model is unique in that it explains and simulates human capability to integrate data from a variety of disparate sources, and to solve large-scale control problems in real time despite the limitations of human memory architecture. The model will be used to assess cognitive complexity of control tasks from the task descriptions, and formulate design recommendations to mitigate the complexity by optimizing interface layout and other design charactersitics. Efficient system engineering methods will be developed to represent a wide range of human resources and assess their role in the total ship operation in dynamic and uncertain environments. In the course of the project, the model will be validated with respect to a significant Navy system. Subsequent development and application of the model in the following Phases will provide system engineering methods to predict the difficulty of system learning and the impact of stress on performance.