Design of a Procedure Analysis Tool (PAT) for affordable aviation device human factors certification

Equipment on airliners must be certified by the FAA to ensure compliance with safety standards that are designed to minimize design-related flight crew errors. This process is currently accomplished by both Inspection and Human-In-The-Loop (HitL) testing - a time-consuming and costly process. A recent Federal Aviation Regulation (FAR) 25.1302 newly requires the analysis of all tasks increasing certification costs beyond current staffing, budget and timelines. The Procedure Analysis Tool (PAT) described in this paper is a decision support tool designed for use by inspectors performing the certification test to meet the FAR25.1302 requirements. The PAT simulates the performance of human operators performing a task on the device under evaluation and may be used as a screening tool to identify tasks that warrant HitL testing, allowing for evaluation within reasonable time and budget. The PAT calculates the percentage of pilots that perform the procedure in excess of an allowed threshold representing the Probability of Failure to Complete PFtoC the procedure. Procedures with long right tails are flagged for full HitL testing. PAT was demonstrated on 15 Swiss European airlines Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) to evaluate the Multifunction Control Display Unit (MCDU). Three procedures resulted in a PFtoC above the threshold, and were therefore flagged for HitL testing. This preliminary analysis highlights the importance of semantic cues when recognizing the emerging mission situations which has the greatest effect on the final time distribution. Entering the 15 procedures into the tool took 5.1 hours and 11.56 seconds average runtime. Analysis of the human factors certification process shows that the PAT reduces the evaluation time by 70% per function.