A Meta‐Model for integrating Human Factors into System Engineering

Abstract

With the emergence of autonomous systems, it is no longer sufficient to only consider the interactions between humans and systems but to assign roles and allocate functions to both. Systems engineering methods, which aim for designing such systems need to take this paradigm shift into account. Domains such as human system integration aim to work towards this objective from a systems engineering perspective. However, one shortcoming of existing systems engineering approaches is that they do not explicitly take the human aspect into account. The objective of this paper is to formalize this relationship at the level of modeling languages by integrating elements from ergonomics modeling languages into SysML/UML, a systems modeling language in widespread use. We conclude that integrating human factors into SysML/UML significantly extends the expressivity regarding ergonomic concepts for designing autonomous systems which collaborate with humans.