Console Representation Environment for Assisted Testing and Evaluation (CREATE)

Navy ship operating consoles must enable minimally manned crews to perform complex, coordinated activities across a range of missions. To this end, console designs must be thoroughly evaluated to ensure they support the diverse missions assigned to Littoral Combat Ships (LCS). Human System Integration (HSI) evaluators must be able to rapidly apply a combination of methods to evaluate proposed platform changes within a low-cost evaluation environment. The environment must be capable of representing the system across multiple levels of fidelity and assess interface options against one another and against baseline configurations. Evaluators must also efficiently collect qualitative feedback from representative study participants and integrate this feedback with quantitative performance metrics. To address these needs, we propose to design and demonstrate a Console Representation Environment for Assisted Testing and Evaluation (CREATE) that guides the design selection process by providing a synthetic environment for rapid instantiation and efficient evaluation of console design alternatives. This environment will provide: (1) tools for selecting and capturing key performance metrics to compare consoles; (2) tools for seamlessly capturing HSI evaluators and representative study participant feedback throughout the studies; and (3) intuitive authoring tools to configure and visualize console environments and layouts without computer programming expertise.