Every two years the European Association for Aviation Psychology (EAAP) organises a conference to bring together the international scientific community. This year, HFC will participate with two presentations addressing how to integrate Human Factors into the traditional system development process. Both contributions are results related to the HoliDes project, HFC is part of.
The first presentation focuses on the Human Factors Reference Technology Platform which is one of the main results of the HoliDes project. A Reference Technology Platform (RTP) by itself is a set of tools or services which are compliant to interoperability specifications to facilitate the traceability and linking of project lifecycle data. The HF-RTP introduces Human Factors into every single system development step. With a web application as front end, this meta-tool supports the user in finding the appropriate methods to address and solve HF issues in different development steps. In doing so, a tool chain is created that structures the system development and ensures data interoperability and availability throughout the process. This also eases the certification of systems as the HF-RTP ensures a transparent and well documented development. Therefore, in comparison to a conventional development process, the use of the HF-RTP should lead to improvements primarily in terms of significant economic savings and reduction of the investments needed for the development.
The second presentation introduces the Human Factors Task Analysis tool, a software for task analysis and human error identification. The main objective of the task analysis tool is to support document-based and empirical parts of the task analysis procedure, the data collection as well as the visualisation of collected data. The main intention of the tool is to allow a more efficient and easier way to apply task analysis procedure for researchers. The tool eases the data acquisition as it is designed to be used on a tablet PC. This is especially important when conducting interviews or observations. The combination of the different steps and the possibility to gather all data with one tool represents another asset as data can instantly be integrated and compared. Accordingly, the output shall provide a structured visualisation of the results. The method is widely applicable and especially beneficial to tasks with elements of higher cognition. The results can be used to restructure tasks and improve system design, in a more efficient way than was possible for task analysis up to now.