Human Factors practitioners have long advocated that information on people and their tasks should be collected and used to inform design and operation. Task Analysis methods and tools have a strong track record but are typically regarded as specialist techniques rather than basic engineering. They also tend to focus on single or small groups of users.
However, the domain of ship design and operation often requires that we take into account large numbers of crew. Ships are also highly complex in engineering terms. The size of the enterprise means that straightforward ways are needed of collating the relationships between people and the systems and equipments which they either use themselves or which impact upon their work or occupation of the ship. This challenge is too great to be managed by a small specialist Human Factors resource: it must be addressed by Systems Engineering processes as a whole.
BAE Systems’ Advanced Technology Centre is developing a tool, based on Hierarchical Task Analysis, which supports a functional decomposition of a ship. This provides a linkage between the people who perform tasks and the equipment they use. The tool is designed to be integrated within the Systems Engineering Environments used by ship development programmes, with cross-referencing against other Systems Engineering products such as the Product Breakdown Structure and Operating Scenarios.
Initial development is focused on generating ships’ complement sizes and making manpower/equipment tradeoffs: manpower optimisation is a pressing concern for customers in ship design and operation. The design philosophy is to keep the tool ‘open’ so that it can collect different types of human data and to support varied levels of detail throughout the ship’s lifecycle.

Task analysis; systems engineering; complement; crew; manpower