CMS-BN: A cognitive modeling and simulation environment for human performance assessment, part 1 — methodology

Yunfei Zhao and Carol Smidts

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2021, vol. 213, issue C

Abstract: Cognitive modeling and simulation studies how a human dynamically interacts with the external world. Human performance assessment based on this concept has long been researched in both cognitive sciences and engineering disciplines. However, existing methods have difficulties in describing the uncertain relationships in a human’s knowledge and in considering the uncertainties in the cognitive process. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel cognitive modeling and simulation environment (CMS-BN) by introducing Bayesian networks to represent a human’s knowledge and Monte Carlo simulation to account for the uncertainties in the cognitive process. The proposed environment explicitly models information perception, reasoning and response in a human’s cognitive process. Information perception works as a filtering mechanism to downselect signals from the external world. Reasoning and response are modeled as traversing the human knowledge base represented as a Bayesian network to retrieve knowledge and updating human belief and attention distribution accordingly. Uncertainties in the cognitive process are characterized through Monte Carlo simulation. The proposed environment also models the interplay between the cognitive process and two performance shaping factors, stress and fatigue, though additional factors can be further considered. We expect the proposed environment to be useful in human reliability analysis and human performance improvement.

Keywords: Cognitive modeling and simulation; Bayesian network; Human performance assessment; Information perception; Reasoning and response; Modified belief propagation; Attention; Performance shaping factor; Monte Carlo simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832021003008
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:213:y:2021:i:c:s0951832021003008

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2021.107776

Access Statistics for this article

Reliability Engineering and System Safety is currently edited by Carlos Guedes Soares

More articles in Reliability Engineering and System Safety from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().