A Formal Method for Evaluating the Performance Level of Human-Human Collaborative Procedures

Human-human interaction is critical to safe operations in domains like nuclear power plants (NPP) and air transportation. Usually collaborative procedures and communication protocols are developed to ensure that relevant information is correctly heard and actions are correctly executed. Such procedures should be designed to be robust to miscommunications between humans. However, these procedures can be complex and thus fail in unanticipated ways. To address this, researchers have been investigating how formal verification can be used to prove the robustness of collaborative procedures to miscommunications. However, previous efforts have taken a binary approach to assessing the success of such procedures. This can be problematic because some failures may be more desirable than others. In this paper, we show how specification properties can be created to evaluate the level of success of a collaborative procedure formally. We demonstrate the capability of these properties to evaluate a realistic procedure for a NPP application.