Toward a crew-system concept for real-time fault management in next-generation aerospace vehicles

Real-time health management on today's shuttle missions is both difficult and labor-intensive, posing a significant risk to crew safety and mission success. Next-generation space transportation vehicles are expected to incorporate several advanced information processing and information display technologies, transforming fault management into a cooperative venture between crews and intelligent systems. Optimizing the potential of this crew-system partnership poses a considerable design challenge. The new technologies vastly increase the space of design options for knowledge engineering architectures, human-machine function allocation, and human-computer interfaces. We propose an integrated program of systems-level simulation, real-time human-in-the-loop scenario simulation, and human performance modeling to "prune" the design space and optimize the crew-systems concept.