Designing an Analyst Support Tool to Identify Human Performance-Related Hazards, Causes, and Mitigations

In the domain of supervisory control, it is important to identify potential risks related to the limitations of human supervisors in order to determine whether mitigations are warranted. Typically, human factors engineers use qualitative methods to identify potentially erroneous human behaviors; however, there are limited computational tools to support such qualitative risk analyses. We have developed a tool to support an analyst who has a description for a supervisory control task and wishes to identify possible hazards, causes, and mitigations. The tool supports: a) decomposing the human supervisor’s tasks into smaller cognitive steps, b) determining successful and failed outcomes of those steps, and c) assigning hazards, causes, and mitigations to the potential failures. The output of the tool is a table summarizing the task and its cognitive subtasks, corresponding to the stages of a human information processing model, as well as the hazards, causes, and mitigations associated with the potentially unsafe outcomes of the subtasks. The tool is a Microsoft Excel workbook with macros written using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Each step of the analysis has a corresponding worksheet in the workbook. After entering the necessary data for a particular step in the analysis, macros automatically populate the next worksheet based on the analyst’s input and the information contained in human factors engineering taxonomies, which the analyst may edit to customize the analysis. This work presents the tool’s requirements and design. Examples of the user interface and tool output are provided.