Employing MBSE to Assess and Evaluate Human Teaming in Military Aviation Command and Control

Future systems development includes Command and Control (C2) technology to support Air Battle Managers (ABMs) and fighter pilots as they support complex missions employing autonomous Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) within a larger System of Systems. In complex, evolving, and dynamic environments, the human operator’s ability to efficiently observe, orient, decide, and act is imperative. However, the operator’s performance can be degraded during changes in UAS custody between ABMs and pilots, which significantly increases operator cognitive workload beyond that typically seen in previous missions. Unfortunately, C2 technology development often places a heavy focus on automation and hardware, leaving the human operator underrepresented to the detriment human-automation interactions. Currently, Digital Engineering and Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) tools are rapidly being adopted in system development, integration, and management to support the complex development effort necessary to integrate these systems. The current research integrated human considerations in MBSE tools to analyze human-automation teaming during the development process. The method supports representation of the automation assistance and human operators during a modeled mission simulation in a pair of specialized activity diagrams referred to as the Mission Actor Diagram and the OODA
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Activity Diagram, permitting analysis of errors and bottlenecks during operation. This method illustrates the potential to reduce operator cognitive workload, improve operator decision making, and increased system performance, while reducing time spent in system redesign.