The Use of Computational Modeling and Simulation to Design and Evaluate a Distributed Work System

Designing integrated systems of humans and automation involves envisioning how work will be performed, how it is affected by technological capabilities, and what will be helpful to support system performance. This is challenging as interactions and dynamics can create emergent effects that are difficult to predict. This demonstration aims to demonstrate the power of computational simulation in designing, verifying, and validating integrated systems of humans and automation. The demo will include an introduction to the simulation framework Work Models that Compute (WMC) used for our ongoing research, how to develop a work model in WMC, a demo of the simulation, and a demo of postprocessing visualization to analyze the simulation results. The approach can be applied in all stages of system design. With an example in aviation, we show how we use computational modeling and simulation to evaluate the robustness of envisioned operations of humans working with automated systems.