Test and Evaluation

The first activity in HFE T&E is to identify equipment, systems and operations which are expected to be high risk from a human performance point of view. High risk situations are those for which human performance is critical; human performance has been degraded in existing systems; and/or human error likelihood is relatively high and would produce results catastrophic to human, animal, or environmental safety.

Once high risk situations are identified, requirements and constraints for HFE evaluations can be specified. This will begin with an identification of constraints, including time limitations, legal barriers to evaluations, and availability of data. Requirements for evaluations in-clude functional requirements, information requirements, performance require-ments, decision requirements, support requirements, and interface requirements.

The next step will entail identification of HFE evaluation scenarios. When the requirements for evaluation of high risk equipment, systems, and opera-tions have been identified, evaluation scenarios can be described. These scenarios include tasks and test conditions to be included in the evaluation.

The next step will be to identify HFE evaluation measures, criteria, and data requirements including the actual data required from the evaluation, and factors influencing the quality of these data. Data quality fac-tors include data reliability, data validity, and data accuracy requirements.