Continuous Human Operator Requirements Analysis of Linkage (CHORAL)

Adventium Labs proposes to implement the Continuous Human Operator Requirements Analysis of Linkage (CHORAL) tool to support a new requirements management methodology that will allow human factors engineers to input, link, and track cognitive human operator requirements within Systems Modeling Language (SysML) models. Off-the-shelf tools focused on project requirements management are designed to capture and validate requirements that define software and hardware system components that are largely quantitative and machine testable. In contrast, human operator requirements are often described in terms of higher-level operational goals that do not as easily support quantitative analysis or validation. When designing a system and its upgrades, this separation leads to costly issues when changes to system requirements result in changes to human operator requirements (and vice versa). CHORAL addresses the need for a tool to manage human operator requirements through the system development lifecycle, with a primary focus on the design phase where human operator requirements are created and first inform the system’s design. CHORAL will support requirements management in MagicDraw in a way that does not require human factors engineers to have expertise in the SysML modeling language. The CHORAL prototype will be implemented as a MagicDraw (Cameo) plugin. CHORAL will employ a new SysML profile that extends the existing SysML class of requirements to capture human operator requirements, and generate a dialog based on the system model to guide the user through the processes of (1) entering human operator requirements elements following a goal-directed task analysis (GDTA) methodology and (2) defining relations between these human operator requirements elements and elements representing the modeled system. We will leverage SysML’s existing capability to relate requirements elements to system model elements, a standard practice that provides the tracking and tracing needed for CHORAL to generate alerts when changes to the model are made that impact relations between human operator requirements and system elements. In Phase I, we will establish CHORAL’s feasibility by demonstrating use of this profile by human factors engineers in a prototype demonstration.