Human-systems integration through the lenses of human factors ergonomics and systems engineering: from cooperation to collaboration

Human-systems integration involves system views and human views on product development. Each of those views has roots in its own discipline: Systems Engineering (SE) and Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE), respectively. Traditionally, these disciplines interact in a cooperative manner throughout the product lifecycle, meaning that different tasks for a shared objective are realized non-synchronously. However, this process of integration through cooperation of disciplines may require more time and effort to embed the other discipline’s perspectives, which increases the risk of misalignment.This paper analyses the areas of overlap and complementarity of SE and HFE through the transition from cooperation to collaboration. In this paradigm, the disciplines would be tightly integrated through the proposed approach rather than added to each other. The approach is enabled by the development of a meta-model to explore the interconnections of disciplines’ entities, identify their overlapping nature, and clarify the added value of collaboration.The key result of the paper is the integration of the core entities emerging from each discipline into a collaborative environment, rather than considering them through cooperative lenses. The value of the proposed work is that the definition of core entities supports the allocation of key responsibilities and roles for the HFE practitioners and systems engineers, including the establishment of key interfaces between the roles and their personal or joint outputs.