Expanding the domain of systems analysis

Abstract

Systems often contain a human component. The human reacts, interprets, errs, ..., succeeds or fails. However, usual analyses of such systems omit the human component, concentrating instead on the, more easily analyzed, software and hardware subsystems. A technique has been developed for including human decision processes by the use of an expert system in a systems analysis. This technique is applied to a surveillance system consisting of sensors which respond to stimuli and the interpretation of these responses by humans. The analysis is carried out via simulations of hardware responses to stimuli, simulations of human inter pretations of those hardware responses, and a measure of the performance of the total system. While the technique was ap plied to a particular system, the inclusion of simulations of human decision processes is essentially independent of the application.