"This guide is designed to assist aircraft certification personnel and avionics manufacturers in evaluating the human factors aspects of Multi-function Displays (MFDs) for FAA certification. The guide focuses specifically on human factors and does not address issues concerning the functional performance or operational accuracy of the display units. The guide is expected to be used as an assistive tool, and is organized as a checklist to provide structure for MFD evaluations. The guide summarizes human factors standards, guidelines, and research on MFDs, and evaluation criteria are grouped in sections of related areas ordered to facilitate the evaluation process. Regulatory documents, advisory information, and recommended practices relevant to the specific topics are cited with each section"--Abstract, Technical report documentation page.

The objectives of this study were to review the current state of aircraft multifunction display and control system (MPDCS) design methods and develop a quantitative method of designing MFDCSs that incorporate important human factors issues. Reports in the literature indicate that MFDCS design can influence flight performance. However, current design methods rely primarily on the designer's intuition and experience. MFDCSs in aircraft cockpits use computer-generated graphics and symbology that have integrated and largely replaced the myriad discrete electromechanical flight instruments found in older aircraft. While much is known about the physical and visual properties of MFDCSs, less is known about which human factors are important for their design and use. MFDCSs may result in greater workload if the distribution of virtual instruments, graphical and text data, and control functions in an n-dimensional structure of display pages places excessive cognitive and psychomotor demands on pilots during either routine or emergency situations. A quantitative method was developed, involving the derivation of a weighted sum of separate cost functions, each of which incorporates the effects of an arbitrary number of human factors and MFDCS design guidelines. The method models, using a high level of abstraction, a pilot's search for specific information or functions among alternative hierarchies of MFDCS display pages. An annealing algorithm was proposed as an effective numerical method for finding the display page hierarchy that minimizes the composite cost function.

On human engineering

Human Factors in System Design, Development, and Testing describes engineering system design as a behavioral process, a process which raises questions the designer must answer. It focuses on the concepts underlying the design process, culminating in a behavioral theory of the design process. Special effort has been made to depict human facto