Context of collaborative human-machine systems architecture design for enhanced functionality awareness and balanced command and control authority

Abstract

Aircraft control systems and their interfaces have been subjects of significant research effort, yet
there are gaps in human-machine collaboration related to functionality requirement awareness in
the development process, and to command-and-control authority of the system being designed.
While their command, control and integration characteristics allow the expectation of near-future
autonomous mobility systems, the path in this direction has been difficult because of increased
exposure to hazards deriving from emerging system functionality and integration issues, and re-
duced situation awareness of system operators. This contribution establishes the context of a
systems architecture framework to reduce uncertainty about whether intended functionality will
match the operating context and its circumstances, and to support developing context-matching
systems architecture with balanced command-and-control in human-machine collaboration. The
context hereby established involves human-machine collaboration between acting engineer and
large language models as supportive agents, proceeding through the generation of system spe-
cifications, and then enabling human verification and authentication of design output considering
the purpose requirements for system functionality. The contribution provides a pilot example de-
claring design intent through prompt questions. This is processed into design synthesis directives
for a large language model, resulting in systems specification outputs from context towards re-
quirements. The example helps assessing the reasons why human-machine collaboration in the
design process and system design can support functional and situational awareness, information
efficiency and operating effectiveness.