Advances in Human Factors, Software, and Systems Engineering

The U.S. Air Force’s 30-year strategy identifies Capability Development as a key area where existing practices are inadequate and need to be transformed in order to keep pace with new threats and the evolving operational environment (American’s Air Force: A call to the future, July 2014) [1]. We believe that the traditional model of delegating most systems engineering and design responsibility to capability providers further contributes to delays and design defects, as there is a clear disconnect in the ways that acquirers, users, and both software and systems engineers understand and contribute to a system’s design. In this paper, we present a novel approach that uses a combination of technologies that overcome each other’s weaknesses, while accentuating each other’s strengths, and allows stakeholders with different backgrounds to understand and contribute to a system’s design. The result is an improvement in quality, development costs, and schedule performance.

While volumetric data were sufficient for roadway design in the past, weight data are needed for better design of roadways now-a-days. While weight and volume data are collected by the Weigh-in-Motion (WIM) devices installed along the roadside, there is no reliable software to analyze the abstract data from the WIM devices. To that end, this study has developed a Data Analysis Software (WIMDAS) in C# programming language. This software uses the data collected from WIM stations (class file and weight file) as inputs. Using some complicated mathematical formulas inputs are analyzed and software outputs the following parameters: traffic volume and distribution such as total traffic, monthly distribution, class distribution, hourly distribution; general traffic configuration such as number of axle per truck, axle spacing; and axle load spectra for different axles such as single, tandem, tridem and quad axles. The outputs are used as inputs in the new pavement mechanistic empirical (ME) design software for predicting performances of roadways pavements. This software is capable of bringing-in several benefits including design efficiency, time, system analysis, and accuracy, which are covered in this paper.

This paper analyzes the results of a joint pedagogical experiment based on the “Sprintfield” serious game. It described the motivations and the creation of this game as well as the way it meets two issues: teaching the difficulties met by the operators in a nuclear power plants in case of severe accident and teaching the particular human behavior in case of crises. Thanks to this role-playing game, students experience a disturbed situation similar in main aspects to the TMI accident; they undergo the same kind of feelings as the operators team did and understand the importance of human and organizational factors on safety, besides technical ones.

The paper presents studies on design and implementation of a complex Virtual Reality system for product design. Main objective of work presented in the paper was to obtain a tool suitable for on-line work with the clients on configuration of visual features of customized city buses. A complex product such as a city bus can have more than 100 visible features (options), which can be changed to obtain infinite configuration possibilities. The paper presents the overview and functions, as well as development process of the created system. Efficiency of the system in the visual configuration process was confirmed by representatives of the company. Capabilities of the system were tested using a sample of users from all the company departments involved in the bus design process. It confirmed high effectiveness of the system in terms of presenting variability of the product features in a clear visual way and improvement of the whole configuration process.

Because the techniques of cyber-attacks are developed every day, it is impossible to defend the cyber-attacks completely. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss how to defend proper control against cyber-attacks when the attackers intrude in the ICS. We focus on new ICS structure without stopping the plant operation under the situation, and aim to improve detection, security and restoration abilities of ICS on the continuous process. In this paper, a virtualization technology is used to realize the three purposes. Using the feature of virtualization technology, we propose a hot-backup system for backup and restore of ICS to protect from cyber-attacks.

Pre-Salt fields in Brazil have been demanding more complex plants to treat the associated gas due to high gas-oil ratio (GOR) combined with a high CO₂ content. It was proposed a combined methodology of Life Cycle Cost Analysis and Reliability, Availability and Maintainability Analysis to assess gas monetization in oil and gas process plants of offshore oil production platforms. Two scenarios have been compared: Gas Export and Total Gas Reinjection. Methodology indicated the Total Gas Reinjection Scenario with better economic advantages—bigger Net Present Value (NPV)—than Gas Export Scenario, using the evaluation of cost drivers (revenue, capital cost and operational cost) at some economic assumptions. It is important to bring up that the methodology, which has been used in this study, can be applied for further analysis.

This paper provides an overview of the process, practices, developments and synergies that Airbus Defence and Space are implementing Human System Integration (HSI) into the Continuous Engineering/Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) throughout the company. The paper highlights these developments, which include internal research programmes, European Union funded research projects and Airbus internal synergy projects to provide a complete system engineering lifecycle. This research includes an EU funded 3 year project HoliDes—Holistic Human Factors and System Design of Adaptive Cooperative Human Machine Systems [1]. HSI has been incorporated in the project lifecycle via US Military (DoD-Instruction 5000.2) [2] with the introduction of a Human System Integration Plan, which is a key requirement for the validation and verification of any new system or any modification to any existing US military system. Airbus DS has used HSI in several innovative approaches, these include, the dramatic reduction in the manpower and costs of deployment and logistic support for large scale military operations, the integration with our Architectural Framework to provide a system architecture that is compliant with the US and UK Lines of development—Training, Equipment, Personnel (HR), Organisation, Information, Logistics, Concepts and Doctrine and Infrastructure and the introduction of ILS and Training into our MBSE approach. Airbus DS recognises the need to integrate HSI into its system engineering lifecycle as in the past the inclusion of human interaction has generally been missed and as most systems interact with people, HSI provides Airbus DS with complete systems integration process. Our Human System Integration (HSI) work at Airbus DS is evolving from the initial Human View Architectural Framework research [4] and then the nine HSI domains—Manpower, Personnel, Training, Human Factors Engineering, Environment, Occupational Health, Safety, Survivability and Habitability [5].

Many traditional usability evaluation methods do not consider mobile-specific issues. This can result in mobile applications that abound in usability issues. We empirically evaluate three sets of usability heuristics for use with mobile applications, including a set defined by the authors. While the set of heuristics defined by the authors surface more usability issues in a mobile application than other sets of heuristics, improvements to the set can be made.

A new fast subtractor based on borrow look-ahead is proposed in this paper. The general condition for minimum time delay in the subtractor has been used to obtain the required result. It passes through 4-gate delay irrespective of number size.

This article offers a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) perspective of the projects IoT. The purpose is to introduce how it happens interaction between applications in a IoT environment and the user, through Theory of Action, adjusting the interaction model of the Semiotic Engineering and applying communicability concepts in a projects IoT. The Semiotic Engineering considers interaction as an artifact to communicate a message from the system designer and the user through the interface, called metacommunication. The Semiotics Engineering has two evaluation methods, SIM (Semiotics Inspection Method) and CEM (Communicability Evaluation Method), which are used, respectively, in the inspection and evaluation of the communicability of a system. Finally, this work presents a overall procedure for the semiotic inspection method to projects IoT.