Modeling the complexities of human performance

The Man-machine Integrated Design and Analysis System (MIDAS) is an integrated human performance modeling software tool that symbolically represents a human's perceptual, cognitive and motor systems in an integrated fashion to produce emergent, high level behavioral predictions characteristic of actual human performance. MIDAS has been augmented in a number of significant ways to simulate even more realistic simulations of human behavior in various aerospace operational contexts. The effort undertaken in the current project culminated in an agent-based sub model (e.g. slots) that can be used by a variety of models to predict and recreate short- and long-term effects of stressors (fatigue, stress, time pressure, inadequate situation awareness, etc.) on performance in aerospace accidents/incidents causation. A computational simulation demonstrated performance influences brought to task performance by fatigue (as characterized by the Yerkes-Dodson theoretical threshold model) that is incurred while undertaking activities required to complete a goal behavior, and the impact of performance-influencing factors (PIFs) on human performance output by combining this with a primitive based action error vulnerability. This paper discusses the computational development effort undertaken in creating the conceptual relationship and PIF implementation in MIDAS.