CPS: Synergy: Collaborative Research: Engineering Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical-Human Systems

This cross-disciplinary project brings together a team of engineering and computer science researchers to create and demonstrate the value of new techniques for ensuring that systems comprised of hardware, software, and humans will perform in a synergistic and safe manner. One notable and increasingly common feature of these “Cyber-Physical-Human” (CPH) systems is that the responsibility for safe operation is shared by hardware and software automation and humans who direct and oversee the behavior of automation and may need to intervene to take manual or shared system control when unexpected events or hardware or software failures occur. The ultimate goal is to achieve levels of safety and performance in system operation that exceed the levels attainable by either skilled human operators or completely autonomous systems acting alone. To do so, the research team is drawing upon their expertise in the design of robust, fault- tolerant control systems, in the design of complexity-reduction architectures for software verification, and human factors techniques to assure high levels of human situation awareness through effective interface design. By doing so, the safety, cost and performance benefits of increasingly sophisticated automation can be achieved without the frequently observed safety risks caused by automation creating confusion or complacency for human operators. The techniques are being created and evaluated using human-in-the-loop simulations, including a medium-fidelity aircraft and flight simulator and a simulation of assistive automation in  a medical context.