Project to rethink software design

A research project involving five United Kingdom universities looks set to revolutionise the way that computer systems are designed.

The £6.8 million research collaboration between City, Edinburgh, Lancaster, Newcastle and York universities is bringing together psychologists, computer scientists, sociologists and statisticians in a bid to create more dependable computer systems.

It aims to discover how people interact with computers in an organisational or business setting and how to avoid the huge financial losses or even accidents that can occur when an unsuccessful system is installed.

"One issue that we are interested in is the notion of people changing their strategies under pressure," said Michael Harrison, of the University of York's computer science department.

"Air traffic controllers, for example, will nurse the aircraft in a relatively empty sky, but stack aircraft if it is a very full sky. They have different working strategies for dealing with those different situations."

The York team will look at whether varying degrees of automation could help operators of computer-based systems cope better with sudden increases in workload. This is a complex problem, as operators can become confused and then enter the wrong commands if the computer has taken over tasks without their knowledge.

Part of learning how to design systems that adapt to the way people work will involve looking at timing issues, ranging from human reaction speeds to planning for deadlines.

"Typically, when people design computer systems they do not think about human deadlines," Professor Harrison said. "But, if we can articulate the kind of decision processes we think users will need to execute, then we can give that to the psychologists and ask can they do it?" Andrew Monk, of York's psychology department, said: "Dependability hasn't traditionally been a concern of human-computer interaction."

Professor Monk, chairman of the British Human Computer Interaction Group, a specialist group of the British Computer Society, added: "We hope to provide tools for the designers such as diagrams or mathematical formulae that they can use to check their design and prove that it is going to work."

The six-year collaboration will also address the reliability, safety and security of critical computer-based systems.

Details: www.dirc.org.uk