HFI Federate and HF tool Evaluation
The Human Factors Integration (HFI) Federate and HF Administrator Tool were originally developed from HFI DTC research into the use of synthetic environments to support HFI. The purpose of the HFI Federate and HF Administrator Tool was to support the measurement and collection of human factors performance data of tasks carried out in a synthetic environment.
The purpose of this study was to assess how the HFI Federate and HF Administrator Tool performed in a test environment under real experimental conditions. The opportunity to test the HFI Federate and HF Administrator Tool arose out of a request for HF experimental support by the NITEworks Programme. The HFI DTC offered to support this requirement using the HFI Federate and HF Administrator Tool to support data gathering. It was decided early on that the NITEworks programme only wanted to make use of the HF Administrator Tool. A logging programme was already being used by the NITEworks programme and therefore the HFI Federate was not used. This document reports the observations and findings gained from integrating the HF Administrator Tool into the NITEworks experiment.
The HF tool was assessed in terms of functionality, utility and usability. Although not all aspects of the tool were tested, the exercise of integrating the HFI DTC tools with the NITEworks Synthetic Environment was a success. We were able to:
- Demonstrate rapid configurability of new human performance instruments;
- Provide support for a realistic number of participants;
- Produce useful data;
- Support an HF practitioner in the administrator user role;
- Provide an effective mechanism to control the monitoring and display of instruments. Instruments could be sent to all individual or combinations of participants as required. It was also possible to quickly check which participants were prompt and which were not so prompt at responding.
Recommendations are made on how to improve the interface usability and some data logging functionality are made. The main benefits of the suggested improvements would be to enable the tool to be used by human factors practitioners from the client organisation and to enable the tool to support data analysis more fully.
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