"Quantifying the Unquantifiable" in Aerospace Electronics and Ergonomics Engineering: Review

Abstract

The today’s efforts of aerospace system engineers, not to mention human psychologists, to assure adequate operational reliability of electronic-and-photonic (E&P) products and satisfactory success-and-safety of a mission or of an extraordinary situation, are, as a rule, based on more or less trustworthy statistics and on what is known as best practices. These efforts are typically unquantifiable, i.e. do not end up with numerical data that enable comparing different possible scenarios of the outcome of a planned undertaking. The objective of this review is to show, using examples from different and sometimes even unconnected areas of aerospace E&P and ergonomics engineering, how probabilistic predictive modeling (PPM) geared to a carefully designed, thoroughly conducted and adequately interpreted highly-focused and highly cost effective failure-oriented accelerated testing (FOAT) can be employed to quantify what is typically considered as “unquantifiable”, i.e., to evaluate the lifetime and the corresponding probability of failure (PoF) of an aerospace E&P system, and/or the role of the human factor (HF), and to predict the outcome of a human-in-the-loop (HITL) related mission or an extraordinary situation, when equipment’s reliability (both hard- and software) and human performance contribute jointly to the never-zero PoF of a mission or an extraordinary situation. The reader is not expected to necessarily “connect the dots”, associated with different situations and examples provided. The only, but an important, feature that these examples have in common is that many aerospace system and ergonomics engineering related tasks and problems, which are perceived and treated today as unquantifiable, could and, in the author’s opinion, should be quantified to assure safe and successful outcome of a particular aerospace undertaking of importance.