Interdisciplinary Research Center on Critical Systems Engineering for Socio-Technical Systems - Progress Report

Critical Systems, i.e., systems whose failure either endangers human life or causes drastic economic losses, form the technological backbone of today's society and are an integral part in such vastly diverse industrial sectors as automotive, aerospace, maritime, automation, energy, health care, banking, and others. The Interdisciplinary Research Center on Critical Systems Engineering for Socio-technical Systems addresses critical systems, which rely on synergistically blending human skills with IT-enabled capabilities of technical systems to jointly achieve the overarching societal and industrial objectives. We focus on instances of such socio-technical systems in the transportation domain, where the overarching objectives are to achieve safe and green mobility, through cooperative semi-autonomous guidance of vehicles with humans in the loop, such as in their roles as drivers, operators, navigation officers, flight controllers, etc., and consider two industrial sectors key in Lower Saxony, the automotive and maritime domains. Such systems are safety critical – human errors, technical failures and malicious manipulation of information can cause catastrophic events leading to loss of life. Creating sufficiently precise real-time mental or digital images of real-world situations, and assuring their coherence among all involved actors (both humans and technical systems) as a basis for coordinated action is a major challenge in socio-technical system design. This calls for constructive approaches involving intuitive and scalable patterns of cooperation, between humans and technical systems, seeking for a balanced sharing of tasks best matching both the abilities of humans and technical systems, or between technical systems. It calls for insights in understanding humans in their interaction with technical systems. It calls for layered approaches in aggregating information along both spatio-temporal and cognitive dimensions. It calls for robust and adaptable designs, seamlessly catering with adverse and changing environmental conditions. It calls for executable and composable models of socio-technical systems, both human and technical, allowing to adaptively, as it were, “zoom” into detailed levels, when reaching critical states to provide fine-grained views of the actual interactions, as well as the need to aggregate to coarse views in order to cope with the sheer complexity of such models.