Requirements Strategy for Managing Human Factors in Automated Vehicle Development

TL;DR

This paper explores how to effectively incorporate human factors requirements into the agile development of automated vehicles, using interviews to identify strategies and challenges faced by industry professionals.

Contribution

It introduces a requirements strategy framework for integrating human factors into AV development, addressing ownership, structure, and workflow challenges.

Findings

Insights into industry practices for HF requirements management

Identification of challenges in agile HF integration

Proposed strategies for HF requirements ownership and structure

Abstract

The integration of human factors (HF) knowledge is crucial when developing safety-critical systems, such as automated vehicles (AVs). Ensuring that HF knowledge is considered continuously throughout the AV development process is essential for several reasons, including efficacy, safety, and acceptance of these advanced systems. However, it is challenging to include HF as requirements in agile development. Recently, Requirements Strategies have been suggested to address requirements engineering challenges in agile development. By applying the concept of Requirements Strategies as a lens to the investigation of HF requirements in agile development of AVs, this paper arrives at three areas for investigation: a) ownership and responsibility for HF requirements, b) structure of HF requirements and information models, and c) definition of work and feature flows related to HF requirements. Based on 13 semi-structured interviews with professionals from the global automotive industry, we provide qualitative insights in these three areas. The diverse perspectives and experiences shared by the interviewees provide insightful views and helped to reason about the potential solution spaces in each area for integrating HF within the industry, highlighting the real-world practices and strategies used.