About the importance of the human in the loop of systems design
In a control room, operators are expected to process and respond to a large amount of information. This information may come from different sources, and is presented in multiple ways, for example on a screen or through an auditory signal. Although it is necessary that all this information is presented and processed, a human being unfortunately has it’s limitations in terms of attention, memory and responsive behaviour. It is therefore of significant importance to take into account the limitations of both the system and the user.

Information systems such as used in a control room often require a human-in-the-loop type of usage. This means that when setting requirements for the development of such a system, we know that one or more human operators have to interact with the automated parts of the system. Therefore, a subset of the engineering and design requirements will address the so-called Human Factors issues: aspects concerning the safety of operation, the workload of operators, multi-modality issues, robustness of the interaction, performance and training aspects, etc. To handle these issues, we need to recognize them in the context of the system engineering and design methods and use appropriate tools and techniques to verify and validate design choices.

The field of Human Factors is a multidisciplinary field incorporating contributions from psychology, engineering, industrial design, statistics, operations research and anthropometry. It covers the science of understanding the properties of human capability and consequently predicting and generalizing human behaviour. It also involves the application of this understanding to the design, development and deployment of systems and services. Finally, it encompasses successful application of Human Factors Engineering to a program ensuring that:
•    The human role in the system is defined to optimise human performance in relation to the core system architecture and ancillary equipment.
•    Adequate human-equipment analyses and trade-off studies are performed, revisiting the assumptions throughout the system design process in an iterative way.
•    System testing and evaluation is conducted to verify that users can safely and effectively operate, maintain and support equipment in its intended environment.
•    The design meets agreed operational performance standards and where this is not the case, to modify the design or associated training in such a way that the resultant manned system meets the required standards.
In general, a human factor is a physical or cognitive property of an individual or social behaviour which is specific to humans and influences the interaction with and functioning of technological systems as well as human-environment equilibriums.
[Taken and adapted from www.wikipedia.com]
Mission & Goal

The D-CIS Lab research agenda is dedicated to the innovation in information systems for collaborate decision making and enhanced situation awareness. One of the research topics is cognitive performance factors: how to investigate and predict human behaviour in order to optimize human performance. Optimizing user interaction is mandatory when we consider the increasing systems complexity, especially with highly networked and collaborative environments. However, our research does not only focus on interaction between the human and a system, but also focuses on how to support or even intervene with the human decision maker. By conducting research on human cognitive performance factors the D-CIS Lab aims at enhancing it’s expertise on actor agent communities.

The work on Human Factors within the D-CIS Lab is carried out by the Human Factors and Cognition team (HF&C-team), the referent research and dissemination group for Thales Human Factors knowledge. Apart from research strictly related to Thales domains and divisions, the HF&C-team anticipates and works on topics that have been identified as state of the art topics by the Human Factors & Ergonomics societies. Therefore, it aims at bridging the gap between the industry on one hand and universities and research institutes on the other hand. In order to encourage collaboration between the academic community and the industry, the D-CIS Lab hosts the D-CIS Human Factors Event annually (http://www.humanfactors.d-cis.nl). The HF&C-team focuses its research on Human Factors issues in a collaborative context, i.e., on groups of humans interacting with groups of systems.

History
Human Factors activities have been handled within the D-CIS Lab since its creation in 2002. In 2008, this research line has been re-enforced by the creation of a dedicated research group: the HF&C-team, initiated in Delft within Thales Research & Technology Nederland, the managing partner of the D-CIS Lab.

Projects
The HF&C-team runs two kinds of projects.
1. Use cases, which are projects with a duration of at most a year where the HF&C-team together with Thales Domain representatives looks into a specific system or product engineering problem. The outcomes are typically Human Factors design recommendations to be integrated for high-level systems design. For instance, together with Above Water Systems unit in Hengelo (NL) and TXchange in Enschede (NL), the HF&C-team is looking at a new asymmetric mission planning concept for ships including new technologies such as the use of a multi-user multi-touch display.
2. The other type of projects are 2 to 4 years fundamental and industrial research projects, varying from European-funded projects to PhD projects, which allow to deepen the core research. For instance, the project “human factors and decision making” focuses on the influence of mood and cognitive control on decision making and on online measurements of these Human Factors. Transversal to these projects, the HF&C team owns, maintains and disseminates a Human Factors tool bench called INTUITION to support Human Factors research studies.

Selected Publications
Amelink, M., Aguero, C.: Structuring Information During the Design Process of a Complex Human-Machine Interface. Proceedings of the IEEE ICIME (International Conference on Information Management and Engineering), 2010, p. 671-675. ISBN: 978-1-4244-5263-7.

Aguero, C., Varkevisser, M., Clot, V.: Human Factors in the Design Process of a Military Human-Machine Interface. Proceedings of the HUMOUS (Humans Operating Unmanned Systems), 2010.

Rondeel, E.W.M., Holland, R.W., Kempen, M., & Wijngaards, N.J.E. (2008). In the mood for change: the influence of mood on change blindness. Proceedings of the Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics International 2008, ISBN  987-1-60643-712-4.

Rondeel, E.W.M., Kempen, M., Wijngaards, N.J.E., Nieuwenhuis, C., & Holland, R.W. (2009). The influence of stress and mood on decision making in critical situations: to what extent can we predict human performance? Revue d’intelligence artificielle, 23, 4, p. 449-466.
 

Contact
Contact Human & Cognition-team:
Martijn Mooij, Program Manager
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , Tel. +31 1 52 51 78 74