Digital avionics mission systems: diversity versus fitness for purpose requirements

摘要

The Human Factors (HF) work with mission systems considers the individual, but as a part of a team, including each individual's reliance on other team members to supply the information necessary for the completion of their role associated tasks. Further, the avionics build for such systems seldom uses safety critical software but is becoming increasingly sophisticated and diverse with relation to the form of its components. Such systems may not be individually checked as safety critical but, if poorly designed or operated, can lead to hazardous employment of your own aircraft or others. For this reason, these systems must of high quality, be designed for ease of use, be shown to have high utility, and be safe to operate; they must be 'fit for purpose'. These fitness for purpose properties should be progressively proven through system design and development activities supporting the production of evidence for the satisfaction of system acceptance. For UK military aviation, system acceptance tests are the culmination of processes leading to the eventual certification of the system as meeting specification and agreed fitness for purpose requirements. This paper's arguments consider some of the burgeoning HF and safety issues associated with such mission systems as brought about by sociotechnological changes and inadequate system specification processes. Issues and implications will be argued as not only being associated with the increasingly sophisticated avionics capabilities of mission systems but also with mission performance problems related to diverse and parallel systems of systems requirements and their effects on the quality of within team and between team work. Note that the arguments of the paper will use the terms avionics, electronics, technology, and engineered systems interchangeably.