Complex engineering systems play a central role in our everyday lives, and technological advances in intelligent systems are becoming more and more vital in their operation. However, most of these systems remain dependent on human decision-makers as overseers of their operations. To assure overall system safety, reliability, and operational effectiveness, a human-centric design approach is needed to account for fundamental human capabilities and limitations. Charles River Analytics' Cognitive Systems Division focuses on developing technologies that enable an effective human-centered engineering approach and the integration of human decision-makers into advanced engineering systems.

Our approach to human-centered engineering is focused in three primary areas:

• Development and deployment of advanced human behavior models that represent human decision-makers and operators in simulation-based system acquisition efforts and human-in-the-loop training/evaluation environments
• Development of cognitively congruent decision aiding systems that underlie human/system interfaces (HSIs) in a manner that effectively mirrors the human decision-maker's cognitive processes, thus providing the most relevant and least distracting view of the operating environment possible
• Development of advanced visualization engines that effectively support the human decision-maker's maintenance of situation awareness (SA) within the overall operating environment

Charles River Analytics Inc. brings a talented and diverse team of researchers and software developers to the human-centered engineering of complex systems. Our team has developed a number of reusable computational tools that have been applied across a wide range of systems engineering problems, including advanced air traffic management (ATM), battlespace management and visualization, and autonomous systems engineering.

Example Projects: