Task inventory and analysis is performed and reported during development and acquisition of military systems, equipment, and facilities to ensure effective human-machine interface design, to facilitate effective training program development and testing and evaluation, and to provide information for manning and workload studies. A database is established to house the task inventory output and task analysis data. Decision Options, Decision Evaluation Process, Decision Reached, Information Requirements, Information Available, and Communication Requirements. Assess is used where two or more manning concepts or human function allocation strategies are to be compared and the most suitable is to be selected. Assess provides a number of evaluation criteria and the user enters a rank order number or other quantitative value for each concept on each criterion.
Normalization is done to handle input by users of numbers other than rank orders.
If rank order inputs are used exclusively then the normalization is not necessary but does not hurt anything. If the numbers used for the various criteria differ in variance, then, in any scheme to combine the criteria as a weighted sum, each criterion will be weighted by its own variance whether you like it or not. The normalization equalizes the variances. It supports development of a weighted objective function of a set of criteria and the value of this function for each of several manning concepts or candidate human roles. It allow the analysts to create a database of task requirements, execute the task network, obtain performance data and modify the network or tasks to evaluate alternate concepts for manning, allocation of tasks to operators or interface design.