The Navy's Littoral Combat Ships were designed to be relatively small surface vessels for operations near a littoral shore theater. These ships were envisioned to be a highly automated, networked, agile, stealthy surface combatant capable of defeating anti-access and asymmetric threats in the littorals with minimum manpower. To date, however, some of these ships have experienced significant engineering and propulsion plant failures that impacted mission accomplishment and were attributable, at least in part, to under staffing and over scheduling the human component of the automation-human operational environment. The critical human components on the Littoral Combat Ship are bridge and engine room staffing. Since the engineering plant has been the source of most major failures to date, this project sought to develop an engine room staffing and scheduling model for the Littoral Combat Ship class given a stated set of minimum mission objectives when operating under normal conditions - called "Condition Ⅲ Underway Steaming", which is used as the basis for official Navy manning calculations, and to provide recommendations for improved automation-human modeling. A survey of the crew of several LCS ships was conducted and the results were analyzed using exploratory data analysis and multiple joint correspondence analysis. Results of the survey analysis were applied to the design of a joint physical-cognitive-automation workflow analysis of critical procedures and failure modes as they map to four dimensions: fatigue, watch and maintenance tasking, and automation-human interface. Workflow analysis results were then simulated in an IMPRINT model of a typical watch period, and the results were evaluated against the four dimensions of the survey. The project validated that the four dimensions analyzed are indeed worthy of consideration in manpower models, and that IMPRINT has the potential, with a few modifications, to model joint physical-cognitive-automation workflows as an improvement to the current manpower-only models used in Navy ship design by accounting for human factors.
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