Carlow Past and Present Projects

Carlow and the U.S. Navy

Within the U.S. Navy human factors and human factors engineering are designated human systems integration (HSI). The primary objective of HSI in maritime system acquisition is to influence design with requirements and constraints associated with human performance and accommodation. The way in which this is accomplished is through several initiatives:

• identify human performance issues and concerns early in system acquisition;
• define the roles of humans in system operations and maintenance early in system development;
• identify deficiencies and lessons learned in baseline comparison systems;
• apply simulation and prototyping early in system design to develop and assess HSI concepts;
• optimize system manning, training, safety, survivability, and quality of life;
• apply human-centered design;
• apply human-centered test and evaluation.

These initiatives constitute the bases for a standardized and formalized HSI Process to address how the system will be designed to ensure that human requirements and considerations are included early in system design and development.

The thrusts of the HSI process are to provide the bases for: designing human-machine interfaces, developing personnel and training systems, providing for human accommodations, and optimizing manning. Optimized manning is defined as the minimum number of personnel consistent with human performance, workload, and safety requirements, and affordability, risk, and reliability constraints.

The goal of HSI in early phases of system acquisition is to define requirements for reduced workload and optimized manning, determine requirements for human performance and safety, specify technology requirements to achieve optimized manning, and integrate these requirements into system performance specifications. These issues point to the need to depart radically from the business as usual approach to military system design, to implement an acquisition strategy and developmental approach which is highly innovative, imaginative, creative, revolutionary, and responsive to mission requirements, engineering and operational constraints, and human capabilities and limitations. The foundation for this innovation lies in the early and comprehensive implementation of the Top Down Requirements Analysis (TDRA).