A Roadmap for Cognitive Engineering in Systems Engineering

We are concerned with three challenges in the design of military Command and Control (C2) systems, namely: the demand for “smaller” organizations, the demand for “better” coordination (human-system, human-human and system-system) and the demand for “faster” execution. Driven by these demands, we performed a survey of Cognitive Engineering techniques with an eye towards how they can improve Systems Engineering efforts. This paper outlines our three challenges (smaller, better, faster) and reviews three successful applications by other Cognitive/Systems engineers faced with similar challenges. The applications employ Computational Cognitive Modeling (to address a demand for smaller), Cognitive Work Analysis (to address a demand for better) and Goal-Directed Task Analysis (to address a demand for faster). These three successes provide a practical roadmap for using Cognitive Engineering methods to address Systems Engineering problems in C2 as well as other domains.