CPS: Synergy: Collaborative Research: Engineering Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical-Human Systems

Abstract: This cross-disciplinary project brings together a team of engineering and computer science researchers to create, validate, and demonstrate the value of new techniques for ensuring that systems composed of combinations of hardware, software, and humans are designed to operate in a truly synergistic and safe fashion. One notable and increasingly common feature of these "Cyber-Physical-Human" (CPH) systems is that the responsibility for safe operation and performance is typically shared by increasingly sophisticated automation in the form of hardware and software, and humans who direct and oversee the behavior of automation yet may need to intervene to take over manual or shared system control when unexpected environmental situations or hardware or software failures occur. The ultimate goal is to achieve levels of safety and performance in system operation that exceed the levels attainable by either skilled human operators or completely autonomous systems acting alone. To do so, the research team will draw upon their expertise in the design of robust, fault-tolerant control systems, in the design of complexity-reduction architectures for software verification, and in human factors techniques for cognitive modeling to assure high levels of human situation awareness through effective interface design. By doing so, the safety, cost and performance benefits of increasingly sophisticated automation can be achieved without the frequently observed safety risks caused by automation creating greater distance between human operators and system operation. The techniques will be iteratively created and empirically evaluated using experimentation in human-in-the-loop simulations, including a medium-fidelity aircraft and flight simulator and a simulation of assistive automation in a medical context. More broadly, this research is expected to impact and inform the engineering of future CPH systems generally, for all industries and systems characterized by an increasing use of hardware and software automation directed and overseen by humans who provide an additional layer of safety in expected situations, Examples include highway and automotive automation, aerospace and air traffic control automation, semi-automated process control systems, and the many forms of automated systems and devices increasingly being used in medical contexts, such as the ICU and operating room. This research is also expected to inform government and industry efforts to provide safety certification criteria for the technologies used in CPH systems, and to educate a next generation of students trained in the cross-disciplinary skills and abilities needed to engineer the CPH systems of the future. The investigators will organize industry, academic, and government workshops to disseminate results and mentor students who are members of underrepresented groups through the course of this research project.