About the Human Factors Integration Defence Technology Centre (HFI DTC)

Defence Technology Centres

The Ministry of Defence believes that there is a high payoff for UK Defence from collaboration within the broader UK science and technology community. Such collaboration means better equipment for MOD, more competitive products for industry and more opportunity for academia to exploit its ideas. For this reason the MoD has inaugurated a number of Defence Technology Centres (DTCs).

A DTC is a formal collaborative arrangement between industry and academic experts in a particular technology, funded jointly by participants and the MOD. The participants work together to generate and enhance the technology vital to the delivery of future UK Defence capabilities.

In April 2003 the MOD announced the inception of the 'Human Factors Integration' Centre which researches and demonstrates technologies to support the development of a range of defence capabilities. The consortium is led by Aerosystems International. Other members are Birmingham University, Brunel University, Cranfield University, Lockheed Martin UK Integrated Systems Ltd, MBDA Ltd, Systems Engineering and Assessment Ltd.

Human Factors Integration

Any system that has a human interface will have Human Factors or Ergonomics issues associated with it. Both these terms are used to describe a perspective on the design of products, systems, procedures and working environments that seeks to maximise overall effectiveness by considering the capabilities, characteristics and limitations of the human operators. The approach is to design the system around the people rather than requiring the people to adapt or work around poor designs and working environments that make operation difficult or even dangerous.

Human Factors problems contribute to system inefficiency or failure and there are many real life examples where this has happened. Most people can think of examples from everyday life where things are difficult to use through poor design. There are also high profile cases where Human Factors issues contributed directly to a serious accident.

Human Factors is an Engineering discipline that must be integrated with other Engineering disciplines such as Systems Engineering and Integration/Test to be effective, hence the term 'Human Factors Integration'.