A military land vehicle specific methodology for Digital Human Modelling assessments

摘要

Background: Digital Human Modelling (DHM) provides a method for assessing land, sea and air vehicles in terms of user fit, reach and vision. This method has been applied widely in the non-military domains; automotive in particular. To date, DHM has had limited application within the Australian Defence Force procurement process for military land vehicles. Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) is currently developing the capability to perform DHM assessments for military land vehicles. This capability aims to provide DSTO with the ability to perform initial assessments of the physical ergonomics of vehicle designs, thereby allowing iterative de-risking of projects to be performed earlier in the design process when built prototypes are generally unavailable for testing with users. Aim: This paper presents the methodology under development by DSTO to fulfil this capability, discusses its validity and identifies shortcomings with current DHM systems that require further investigation to improve DHM based assessments of military land vehicles. Methods: To date, a DHM assessment methodology has been developed by reviewing the military land vehicle occupant workstations and tasks to identify factors that must be addressed in an assessment. Factors identified included soldier specific body size, equipment worn and a number of military specific tasks. An iterative process was then used to address each of these factors in a commercial DHM tool: Human Solution's RAMSIS. The methodology developed allows for the assessment of expected driving posture, reach, vision within the vehicle, vision external to the vehicle, ingress and egress. Results: Advantages of the developed DHM assessment methodology are discussed, including the use of boundary mannequins based on an ADF soldier specific anthropometric dataset and ADF equipment specific clothing corrections. Limitations of the methodology are then discussed, for example no modelling of tissue compression and limitations of the DHM software used. Conclusions: This paper concludes by relating the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed methodology to the military procurement process to identify areas for further research.