An Architecture Profile for Human–System Integration

Abstract

Current architectural frameworks have adequate semantics to represent the hardware and software elements of a system. However, they are deficient when it comes to representing and integrating humans with the rest of the system. Current system engineering practices address human considerations as an afterthought. With advances in methods for human–system integration, there is an opportunity to extend current architecture modeling semantics to include humans and human–system integration semantics. To better integrate humans in and with systems, traditional systems engineering semantics need to be extended with human behavior representation models. In order to implement human considerations within complex system representations, this paper presents a Human–System Integration Profile, which was specifically created to represent human aspects as a lens within the overall system architecture. The Human–System Integration Profile is expected to be one of many tools that will be needed to fully integrate human considerations with system architectures and perform human–system trade-offs.