The Human Viewpoint: Including the Human Component in System Architectures

The Human Viewpoint captures the impact of the human operators as part of the larger system architecture and informs on human capabilities and limitations for system design. The Human View methodology results in an integrated set of models that describe human tasks, roles and interactions that can be used to contribute to system development and facilitate human-system trade-off considerations. This human-focused perspective can help reduce system risk by communicating information about the balance between operator constraints, such as workload and availability, and system performance. An example of an Aerial Reconnaissance Support Team (ARST) responding to changes in combinations of sensor types as part of the Intelligence Processing, Exploitation & Dissemination (PED) process is used as an example. The Human Viewpoint, used early in the system architecting process, can help validate manpower and personnel requirements and can be used to evaluate different architecture implementations to ameliorate stakeholder concerns.