Manpower Modeling and Human-Centered Design for 21^st Century Naval Platforms

Abstract

The United States Navy is placing strong emphasis on ensuring that future naval platforms are not only affordable and effective, but also operable and maintainable with fewer personnel. The realization of optimal manning and optimal ownership costs requires that the human be considered as a major component of the ship and its associated systems early in the acquisition process. Toward that end, systems engineers must have tools and processes to support human-centered engineering from the outset of the design, and must be able to exchange human performance and cost data with other members of the engineering team. Similarly, the US Navy must have tools to evaluate human versus system function allocation tradeoffs during the early phases of ship acquisition, when changes are easier and less costly to implement. Two efforts, the Ship Manpower Analysis and Requirements Tools (SMART) and the Systems Engineering Analysis Integration Tool (SEAIT), are being conducted to assist navy manpower evaluators, ship designers and government program managers in meeting the challenge of optimally manned ships. Both efforts use modeling and simulation of human performance and skill data to determine the optimum crew mix. Outputs from SMART and SEAIT are being designed for transition to the Human Centered Design Environment (HCDE), a collaborative engineering environment that integrates human centered and systems engineering processes and tools into a common data repository.