Since its inception, just after the Second World War, Human Factors research has paid special attention to the issues surrounding human control of systems. Command and control environments continue to represent a challenging domain for human factors research. Modelling Command and Control takes a broad view of command and control research, to include C2 (command and control), C3 (command, control and communication), and C4 (command, control, communication and computers) as well as human supervisory control paradigms. The book presents case studies in diverse military applications (for example, land, sea and air) of command and control. The book explores the differences and similarities in the land, sea and air domains; the theoretical and methodological developments, approaches to system and interface design, and the workload and situation awareness issues involved. It places the role of humans as central and distinct from other aspects of the system. Using extensive case study material, Modelling Command and Control demonstrates how the social and technical domains interact, and why each require equal treatment and importance in the future.
Complex sociotechnical systems' are systems made up of numerous interacting parts, both human and non-human, operating in dynamic, ambiguous and safety critical domains. Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) is a structured framework specifically developed for considering the development and analysis of these complex socio-technical systems. Unlike many human factors approaches, CWA does not focus on how human-system interaction should proceed (normative modelling) or how human-system interaction currently works (descriptive modelling). Instead, through a focus on constraints, it develops a model of how work can be conducted within a given work domain, without explicitly identifying specific sequences of actions (formative modelling). The framework leads the analyst to consider the environment the task takes place within, and the effect of the imposed constraints on the way work can be conducted. It provides guidance through the process of answering the questions of why the system exists, what activities can be conducted within the domain as well as how these activities can be achieved, and who can perform them. The first part of the book contains a comprehensive description of CWA, introducing it to the uninitiated. It then presents a number of applications in complex military domains to explore and develop the benefits of CWA. Unlike much of the previous literature, particular attention is placed on exploring the CWA framework in its entirety. This holistic approach focuses on the system environment, the activity that takes place within it, the strategies used to conduct this activity, the way in which the constituent parts of the system (both human and non-human) interact and the behaviour required. Each stage of this analysis identifies the constraints governing the system; it is contended that through this holistic understanding of constraints, recommendations can be made for the design of system interaction; increasing the ability of users to cope with unanticipated, unexpected situations. This book discusses the applicability of the approach in system analysis, development and evaluation. It provides process to what was previously a loosely defined framework.
Offering a unique perspective on vehicle design and on new developments in vehicle technology, this book seeks to bridge the gap between engineers, who design and build cars, and human factors, as a body of knowledge with considerable value in this domain. The work that forms the basis of the book represents more than 40 years of experience by the authors. Human Factors in Automotive Engineering and Technology imparts the authors' scientific background in human factors by way of actionable design guidance, combined with a set of case studies highly relevant to current technological challenges in vehicle design. The book presents a novel and accessible insight into a body of knowledge that will enable students, professionals and engineers to add significant value to their work.
Aviation is a complex system, and the investigation and modelling of aviation accident causation can suffer from being artificially manipulated into non-complex models and methods. This book addresses this issue by developing a new approach to investigating aviation accident causation through information networks, which centralise communication and the flow of information as key indicators of a system’s health and risk. The book’s new model offers many potential developments and some key areas are studied in this research, maintaining firm focus on the overall health of a system.
Military command and control is not merely evolving, it is co-evolving. Technology is creating new opportunities for different types of command and control, and new types of command and control are creating new aspirations for technology. The question is how to manage this process, how to achieve a jointly optimised blend of socio and technical and create the kind of agility and self-synchronisation that modern forms of command and control promise. The answer put forward in this book is to re-visit sociotechnical systems theory. In doing so, the problems of 21st century command and control can be approached from an alternative, multi-disciplinary and above all human-centred perspective. Human factors (HF) is also co-evolving. The traditional conception of the field is to serve as a conduit for knowledge between engineering and psychology yet 21st century command and control presents an altogether different challenge. Viewing military command and control through the lens of sociotechnical theory forces us to confront difficult questions about the non-linear nature of people and technology: technology is changing, from platform centric to network centric; the interaction with that technology is changing, from prescribed to exploratory; and complexity is increasing, from behaviour that is linear to that which is emergent. The various chapters look at this transition and draw out ways in which sociotechnical systems theory can help to understand it. The sociotechnical perspective reveals itself as part of a conceptual toolkit through which military command and control can be transitioned, from notions of bureaucratic, hierarchical ways of operating to the devolved, agile, self-synchronising behaviour promised by modern forms of command and control like Network Enabled Capability (NEC). Sociotechnical system theory brings with it a sixty year legacy of practical application and this real-world grounding in business process re-engineering underlies the entire book. An attempt has been made to bring a set of sometimes abstract (but no less useful) principles down to the level of easy examples, design principles, evaluation criteria and actionable models. All of these are based on an extensive review of the current state of the art, new sociotechnical/NEC studies conducted by the authors, and insights derived from field studies of real-life command and control. Time and again, what emerges is a realisation that the most agile, self-synchronising component of all in command and control settings is the human.
Taking an integrated, systems approach to human performance issues on the flight deck of the modern airliner, this book describes the inter-relationships between the various application areas of human factors, recognising that the human contribution to the operation of an airliner does not fall into neat pigeonholes. The relationship between areas such as pilot selection, training, flight deck design and safety management is continually emphasised. It also affirms the upside of human factors in aviation and avoids placing undue emphasis on when the human component fails.
Writing high-quality papers suitable for publication within international scientific journals is now an essential skill for all early-career researchers; their career progression and the reputation of the department in which they work depends upon it. However, many manuscripts are rejected or sent back for major re-working not because the science they contain is in any way 'bad', but because the same problems keep occurring in the way that the material is presented. It is one thing to write a good scientific paper, however it is quite another thing to get it published. This requires some additional nous. In writing this book Don Harris draws upon nearly a quarter of a century of experience as an author and reviewer of research papers, and ultimately as a journal editor. By his own admission, it contains all the things he wished that his mentors had told him 25 years ago, but didn't. The material in the book is drawn from many years of finding all these things out for himself, usually by trial and error (but mostly error!). The text adopts a much lighter touch than is normally found in books of this type - after all, who really wants to read a book about writing research papers? The author describes his own unique approach to writing journal papers (which, in his own words, has proved to be extremely successful). All major points are illustrated with examples from his own, published works. The book is written in the form of a manual for constructing a journal manuscript: read a chapter, write a section. However, the material it contains goes beyond just this and also describes how to select a target journal, the manuscript submission process, what referees are looking for in a good journal paper, and how to deal with the referees' comments. Each chapter concludes with a checklist to ensure all the key elements have been addressed.
Having an accurate understanding of what is going on is a key commodity for teams working within military systems. 'Situation awareness' (SA) is the term that is used within human factors circles to describe the level of awareness that operators have of the situation that they are engaged in; it focuses on how operators develop and maintain a sufficient understanding of 'what is going on' in order to achieve success in task performance. Over the past two decades, the construct has become a fundamental theme within the areas of system design and evaluation and has received considerable attention from the human factors research community. Despite this, there is still considerable debate over how SA operates in complex collaborative systems and how SA achievement and maintenance is best supported through system, procedure and interface design. This book focuses on the recently developed concept of distributed situation awareness, which takes a systems perspective on the concept and moves the focus on situation awareness out of the heads of individual operators and on to the overall joint cognitive system consisting of human and technological agents. Situation awareness is viewed as an emergent property of collaborative systems, something that resides in the interaction between elements of the system and not in the heads of individual operators working in that system. The first part of the book presents a comprehensive review and critique of existing SA theory and measurement approaches, following which a novel model for complex collaborative systems, the distributed SA model, and a new modelling procedure, the propositional network approach, are outlined and demonstrated. The next part focuses on real-world applications of the model and modelling procedure, and presents four case studies undertaken in the land warfare, multinational warfare and energy distribution domains. Each case study is described in terms of the domain in question, the methodology employed, and the findings derived in relation to situation awareness theory. The third and final part of the book then concentrates on theoretical development, and uses the academic literature and the findings from the case study applications to validate and extend the distributed SA model described at the beginning of the book. In closing, the utility of the distributed SA model and modeling procedure are outlined and a series of initial guidelines for supporting distributed SA through system design are articulated.
This book presents a human factors and ergonomics evaluation of a digital Mission Planning and Battle-space Management (MP/BM) system. An emphasis was placed on the activities at the Brigade (Bde) and the Battle Group (BG) headquarters (HQ) levels. The analysts distributed their time evenly between these two locations. The human factors team from Brunel University, as part of the HFI DTC, undertook a multi-faceted approach to the investigation, including: - observation of people using the traditional analogue MP/BM processes in the course of their work - cognitive work analysis of the digital MP/BM system - analysis of the tasks and goal structure required by the digital MP/BM - assessment against a usability questionnaire - analysis of the distributed situation awareness - an environmental survey. The book concludes with a summary of the research project's findings and offers many valuable insights. For example, the recommendations for short-term improvements in the current generation of digital MP/BM system address general design improvements, user-interface design improvements, hardware improvements, infrastructure improvements and support improvements. In looking forward to the next generation digital MP/BM systems, general human factors design principles are presented and human factors issues in digitising mission planning are considered.
Fratricide has been defined as firing on your own forces, when mistaking them for enemy forces, which results in injury or death. Rates of fratricide incidence have been steadily increasing and the complexity of the contemporary operating environment may lead to a continuation of this trend. Although the majority of research into fratricide has focused on the development of technological decision aids, recent explorations highlight the need to emphasise the social aspects within a socio-technical framework. This book presents and validates, via the use of case studies, a model of teamwork and decision-making factors that are associated with incidents of fratricide. In summary, it offers a review and evaluation of contemporary theoretical perspectives on teamwork and fratricide, as well as a range of accident analysis approaches. A novel theory of fratricide is then presented followed by a new methodology for assessing fratricide. Naturalistic case studies of teams are undertaken in the military domain. These studies illustrate the approach and offer early validation evidence. In closing, the book presents a series of principles designed to reduce the likelihood of fratricide in the future.
In this book of critical writings, Janet Wolff examines issues of exile, memoir, and movement from the perspective of the female stranger. Wolff, born in Great Britain but now living and working in the United States, discusses the positive consequences of women's travel; the use of dance (another form of mobility) as an image of liberation; whether exile or distance provides a better vantage point for cultural criticism than centrality and stability; the place of personal memoir in academic writing; and much more.
Since its inception, just after the Second World War, Human Factors research has paid special attention to the issues surrounding human control of systems. Command and control environments continue to represent a challenging domain for human factors research. Modelling Command and Control takes a broad view of command and control research, to include C2 (command and control), C3 (command, control and communication), and C4 (command, control, communication and computers) as well as human supervisory control paradigms. The book presents case studies in diverse military applications (for example, land, sea and air) of command and control. The book explores the differences and similarities in the land, sea and air domains; the theoretical and methodological developments, approaches to system and interface design, and the workload and situation awareness issues involved. It places the role of humans as central and distinct from other aspects of the system. Using extensive case study material, Modelling Command and Control demonstrates how the social and technical domains interact, and why each require equal treatment and importance in the future.
Having an accurate understanding of what is going on is a key commodity for teams working within military systems. 'Situation awareness' (SA) is the term that is used within human factors circles to describe the level of awareness that operators have of the situation that they are engaged in; it focuses on how operators develop and maintain a sufficient understanding of 'what is going on' in order to achieve success in task performance. Over the past two decades, the construct has become a fundamental theme within the areas of system design and evaluation and has received considerable attention from the human factors research community. Despite this, there is still considerable debate over how SA operates in complex collaborative systems and how SA achievement and maintenance is best supported through system, procedure and interface design. This book focuses on the recently developed concept of distributed situation awareness, which takes a systems perspective on the concept and moves the focus on situation awareness out of the heads of individual operators and on to the overall joint cognitive system consisting of human and technological agents. Situation awareness is viewed as an emergent property of collaborative systems, something that resides in the interaction between elements of the system and not in the heads of individual operators working in that system. The first part of the book presents a comprehensive review and critique of existing SA theory and measurement approaches, following which a novel model for complex collaborative systems, the distributed SA model, and a new modelling procedure, the propositional network approach, are outlined and demonstrated. The next part focuses on real-world applications of the model and modelling procedure, and presents four case studies undertaken in the land warfare, multinational warfare and energy distribution domains. Each case study is described in terms of the domain in question, the methodology employed, and the findings derived in relation to situation awareness theory. The third and final part of the book then concentrates on theoretical development, and uses the academic literature and the findings from the case study applications to validate and extend the distributed SA model described at the beginning of the book. In closing, the utility of the distributed SA model and modeling procedure are outlined and a series of initial guidelines for supporting distributed SA through system design are articulated.
This book presents a human factors and ergonomics evaluation of a digital Mission Planning and Battle-space Management (MP/BM) system. An emphasis was placed on the activities at the Brigade (Bde) and the Battle Group (BG) headquarters (HQ) levels. The analysts distributed their time evenly between these two locations. The human factors team from Brunel University, as part of the HFI DTC, undertook a multi-faceted approach to the investigation, including: - observation of people using the traditional analogue MP/BM processes in the course of their work - cognitive work analysis of the digital MP/BM system - analysis of the tasks and goal structure required by the digital MP/BM - assessment against a usability questionnaire - analysis of the distributed situation awareness - an environmental survey. The book concludes with a summary of the research project's findings and offers many valuable insights. For example, the recommendations for short-term improvements in the current generation of digital MP/BM system address general design improvements, user-interface design improvements, hardware improvements, infrastructure improvements and support improvements. In looking forward to the next generation digital MP/BM systems, general human factors design principles are presented and human factors issues in digitising mission planning are considered.
Military command and control is not merely evolving, it is co-evolving. Technology is creating new opportunities for different types of command and control, and new types of command and control are creating new aspirations for technology. The question is how to manage this process, how to achieve a jointly optimised blend of socio and technical and create the kind of agility and self-synchronisation that modern forms of command and control promise. The answer put forward in this book is to re-visit sociotechnical systems theory. In doing so, the problems of 21st century command and control can be approached from an alternative, multi-disciplinary and above all human-centred perspective. Human factors (HF) is also co-evolving. The traditional conception of the field is to serve as a conduit for knowledge between engineering and psychology yet 21st century command and control presents an altogether different challenge. Viewing military command and control through the lens of sociotechnical theory forces us to confront difficult questions about the non-linear nature of people and technology: technology is changing, from platform centric to network centric; the interaction with that technology is changing, from prescribed to exploratory; and complexity is increasing, from behaviour that is linear to that which is emergent. The various chapters look at this transition and draw out ways in which sociotechnical systems theory can help to understand it. The sociotechnical perspective reveals itself as part of a conceptual toolkit through which military command and control can be transitioned, from notions of bureaucratic, hierarchical ways of operating to the devolved, agile, self-synchronising behaviour promised by modern forms of command and control like Network Enabled Capability (NEC). Sociotechnical system theory brings with it a sixty year legacy of practical application and this real-world grounding in business process re-engineering underlies the entire book. An attempt has been made to bring a set of sometimes abstract (but no less useful) principles down to the level of easy examples, design principles, evaluation criteria and actionable models. All of these are based on an extensive review of the current state of the art, new sociotechnical/NEC studies conducted by the authors, and insights derived from field studies of real-life command and control. Time and again, what emerges is a realisation that the most agile, self-synchronising component of all in command and control settings is the human.
Fratricide has been defined as firing on your own forces, when mistaking them for enemy forces, which results in injury or death. Rates of fratricide incidence have been steadily increasing and the complexity of the contemporary operating environment may lead to a continuation of this trend. Although the majority of research into fratricide has focused on the development of technological decision aids, recent explorations highlight the need to emphasise the social aspects within a socio-technical framework. This book presents and validates, via the use of case studies, a model of teamwork and decision-making factors that are associated with incidents of fratricide. In summary, it offers a review and evaluation of contemporary theoretical perspectives on teamwork and fratricide, as well as a range of accident analysis approaches. A novel theory of fratricide is then presented followed by a new methodology for assessing fratricide. Naturalistic case studies of teams are undertaken in the military domain. These studies illustrate the approach and offer early validation evidence. In closing, the book presents a series of principles designed to reduce the likelihood of fratricide in the future.
Complex sociotechnical systems' are systems made up of numerous interacting parts, both human and non-human, operating in dynamic, ambiguous and safety critical domains. Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) is a structured framework specifically developed for considering the development and analysis of these complex socio-technical systems. Unlike many human factors approaches, CWA does not focus on how human-system interaction should proceed (normative modelling) or how human-system interaction currently works (descriptive modelling). Instead, through a focus on constraints, it develops a model of how work can be conducted within a given work domain, without explicitly identifying specific sequences of actions (formative modelling). The framework leads the analyst to consider the environment the task takes place within, and the effect of the imposed constraints on the way work can be conducted. It provides guidance through the process of answering the questions of why the system exists, what activities can be conducted within the domain as well as how these activities can be achieved, and who can perform them. The first part of the book contains a comprehensive description of CWA, introducing it to the uninitiated. It then presents a number of applications in complex military domains to explore and develop the benefits of CWA. Unlike much of the previous literature, particular attention is placed on exploring the CWA framework in its entirety. This holistic approach focuses on the system environment, the activity that takes place within it, the strategies used to conduct this activity, the way in which the constituent parts of the system (both human and non-human) interact and the behaviour required. Each stage of this analysis identifies the constraints governing the system; it is contended that through this holistic understanding of constraints, recommendations can be made for the design of system interaction; increasing the ability of users to cope with unanticipated, unexpected situations. This book discusses the applicability of the approach in system analysis, development and evaluation. It provides process to what was previously a loosely defined framework.
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