Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems Integration

This chapter describes areas of conceptual affiliation and shared interest between PRISM research and that of the Group Performance Environments Research (GROUPER) laboratory regarding the integration of humans, technological systems, and coordinated task performance. The history of GROUPER research builds on a sociotechnical systems tradition originally developed in the United Kingdom, as well as distributed expertise coordination and human-systems integration paradigms characteristic of cybernetic and human supervisory control models from the United States. This chapter describes important mathematical and engineering concepts describing system dynamics and performance measurement criteria that permit a quantitative study of teams, task, and time in complex settings. In addition, commonalities across application domains are utilized to capture and describe more generalizable principles with modeling value across a range of human-systems integration domains. This combination of applications, approaches, and criteria demonstrate this multidisciplinary approach to the design, evaluation and improvement of sociotechnical systems engineering analysis.