As prescribed in DoD Instruction (DoDI) 5000.97, “Digital Engineering”, digital models (Including digital twins), must incorporate physics-based models and human performance models to properly architect the digital engineering ecosystem, allowing programs to create digital artifacts that defines and manipulates real-world data for effective design, development, and trade-off analyses to optimize capabilities for human use. Modeling is essential to understanding complex systems and system interdependencies and to communicate among team members and stakeholders, and is greatly enhanced with the incorporation of human performance requirements and characteristics to quantify mission outcomes. Contributing to the digital thread are activities described in DoDI 5000.95, “Human Systems Integration in Defense Acquisition” such as a human (or user) viewpoint architecture description, task analyses, analysis of human error, and use of human modeling and simulation (M&S).
It has been well documented that when human requirements are not adequately considered or captured, the acquisition results are reduced system effectiveness and higher risk for failures. Late human requirements integration leads to increased cost and program schedule delivery delays, and negatively impacts mission performance. To support rapid technology innovation and mission engineering for capability assessment, the department has adopted ANSI/HFES-400 “Human Readiness Levels” to help codify HSI M&S activity to deliver an HSI maturity metric at acquisition milestones commensurate to the technology readiness, increasing the speed of capability delivery for greater effectiveness, suitability, and survivability (
https://www.cto.mil/news/dod-hrl/). This discussion will highlight the specific digital and model-based approaches, methods and tools to incorporate HSI into the digital thread to achieve HSI goals IAW DoD Directive 5000.01, DoDI 5000.97 and DoDI 5000.95.