Integrated Design and Analysis Environment for Safety Critical Human-Automation Systems

Flight deck systems, like many safety critical systems, often involve complex interactions between multiple human operators, automated subsystems, and physical structures. Individual components are extensively evaluated and are often redundantly deployed, so catastrophic failures predominately arise not through component failure but as the result of a sequence of failures that cascade because of some unforeseen combination of off-nominal conditions. Such sequences may involve human operators, control algorithms, software implementations, physical structures, and other components of the system. Analyzing the potential for these failure scenarios is extremely difficult, not only because of the inherent complexity of such systems but also because of the multidisciplinary nature of the system itself. While many development tools exist to conduct deep analyses within individual disciplines, there is a lack of tools available for deep analysis of complex multidisciplinary designs. The goal of this proposed research project is thus to create a new class of development tool that allows designers to specify, design, integrate, and conduct analyses of complex systems across disciplinary boundaries. Through this new tool, the dynamic interactions between system components in the presence of off-nominal conditions can be explored to uncover systemic vulnerabilities, precursory conditions, and likely outcomes. More »