ADVISES

The engineering of interactive, safety-critical systems is an inter-disciplinary endeavor. This creates a number of practical problems for many different industries. Organizations must integrate techniques and methods for many different disciplines. These range from hardware engineering through to human factors and management. The difficulty of achieving such integration stems in part from a mutual ignorance about these complementary disciplines, in part from a lack of methods in certain areas and in part from a failure to effectively integrate existing methods and techniques. We believe that the only way to solve such a problem is to have a tight integration of research contributions from all the disciplines relevant to the problem, namely:

• accident and incident analysis;
• human-error analysis;
• human-computer interaction;
• human factors;
• interactive systems engineering;
• safety-critical systems engineering;
• safety management systems and organizational learning;
• workplace and observational studies.

This partners in this research and training network have recognized expertise in each of the areas mentioned above. Our main objective is to provide a multi-disciplinary research training that can combat the impact of human error during the design, operation and management of safety-critical, interactive systems. Additionally, the exchange of knowledge, practices, tools and experience between adjacent (but still too distinct) disciplines can lead to the efficient integration of complementary research methods. Ultimately, it is hoped that this will contribute to a new and more unified research agenda for the development of safety-critical, interactive systems.

Application domains: Education & Training

Scientific areas: Software engineering