Human-Systems Integration: Human Factors in a Systems Context

HSI in the Acquisition Process
The major challenge to enhancing human performance while reducing crew size in any complex system is the increased incidence of human error. The International Maritime Organization, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Navy Safety Center have agreed that human error is the causal factor in 80% of mishaps on ships and in maritime systems. The incidence and impact of human error will only accelerate as the complexity of systems increases and the workload placed on remaining crew accelerates. Thus HSI becomes increasingly important.

The integration of the HSI domains is achieved at two levels: consolidation of domain activities in support of overarching HSI, and trade-offs among HSI domains to optimize the integration of the human in the system. Domain consolidation is achieved through a number of initiatives, including
• Preparing an HSI plan that describes and schedules overarching
HSI and individual HSI domain activities and products
throughout the acquisition process, including interactions
among domain activities and collaboration of individual domains
to achieve common objectives.
• Collecting and tracking operator and maintainer HSI domain
feedback and lessons learned from legacy systems.
• Conducting a unified and consolidated front-end analysis (topdown
requirements analysis) that addresses requirements and
concepts for each HSI domain and the interactions of requirements
for individual domains.
• Maintaining a consolidated database on HSI assumptions,
issues, questions, expected problems, risks, concepts, and criteria
concerning all aspects of human involvement in the system.
• Managing and mitigating HSI domains.
• Applying modeling and simulation techniques to develop and
assess derived requirements, design concepts, and criteria,
including task modeling, workload assessment, and human-inthe-
loop simulation.