HUMAN FACTORS AND ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN
Abstract
The overarching objective of this activity is the achievement of FORCEnet and Sea Power 21 goals by developing human factors principles and cognitive models for human centric design, decision support systems for collaborative decision making, and adaptive command and control structures. The CNO's new Maritime Strategy and the Commander Fleet Forces Command complementary plan to revise organization of Maritime Operations Centers (MOC) place high priority on the aforementioned FORCEnet and Sea Power 21 goals. Specific objectives focus on improving small team, platform, task force, and battle group operations by developing advanced human factors technologies for incorporation into operational systems. The goals and payoffs are to enhance human performance effectiveness; improve the timeliness and quality of decision making; develop strategies to mitigate high workload and ambiguity; reduce manning; improve situational awareness and speed of command through a deeper understanding of human capabilities and limitations; and improvement of team decision making in ad-hoc, complex problem solving scenarios. The current specific objectives are: a) Human Computer Interaction/Visualization: Develop an understanding of the limitations of human perceptual and attentional systems in relation to maximizing user performance when interacting with complex Naval displays. A combination of computational, cognitive modeling and psychological studies are employed to determine the capacity limitations on human performance that will undoubtedly have impact in reduced manning requirements, including information-rich weapons platforms. Develop technology for improving human interaction with autonomous systems and for improving virtual reality systems for training purposes. b) Collaboration and Knowledge Interoperability: Develop an understanding of the high-level cognitive processes underlying team knowledge processing, decision making and collaboration in order to improve team performance in the autonomous, agile, quick-response combat team of the future. Develop cognitive, science-based tools, models, computational methods, and human-agent interfaces to enhance team collaboration effectiveness and team performance in complex problem solving scenarios. Specific objectives include application of discourse analysis methods and other process metrics to assess team performance. A conceptual model of team collaboration will be constructed and computational relationships among processes and team performance will be developed. Findings will be validated and demonstrated in operationally oriented testbeds by addressing issues including: rapid team analysis of large volume, uncertain data; knowledge interoperability in coalition ops; measures of team situational awareness; accelerated team synchronization; improved heterogeneous team performance; team collaboration performance metrics; cultural/language/experience-free representation and transfer of meaning. c) Organizational Design and Decision Support Systems: Develop quantitative, executable models, task graphs and optimization algorithms for the organizational design of MOC, consistent with the Navy's New Maritime Strategy. Investigate through modeling and simulation human competency requirements for staffing MOC. Develop quantitative formalisms for monitoring and assessing the completeness, consistency and accuracy of rules of engagement (ROE). d) Social Network Analysis: Develop computational models and algorithms for the analysis of terrorist threats and counter-measures, and strategies against terrorist threats. Develop new computational algorithms for the discovery of missing and hidden nodes in complex graphs applicable to the problem of understanding hidden information in terror networks. Develop new approaches to calculation of network completeness. Develop computational approaches to the study of factionalism in social movements using Islamist movements as exemplar data collectivities. The decrease from FY 2013 to FY 2014 is due to the transfer of requirements and associated funding to the Human Factors activities in the Warfighter Sustainment Applied Research PE 0602236N, to provide an easily navigable and consolidated overview of all Human Factors investments in a single PE. The following are non-inclusive examples of accomplishments and plans for projects funded in this activity:
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2015
- Source ID
- 16e145fb5350cf495761ecac379f6caf