The Virtual Driver: Integrating Task Planning and Cognitive Simulation with Human Movement Models

Digital human modeling has traditionally focused on the physical aspects of humans and the environments in which they operate. As the field moves towards modeling dynamic and more complex tasks, cognitive and perceptual aspects of the human's performance need to be considered. Cognitive modeling of complex tasks such as driving has commonly avoided the complexity of physical simulation of the human, distilling motor performance to motion execution times. To create a more powerful and flexible approach to the modeling of human/machine interaction, we have integrated a physical architecture of human motion (the Human Motion Simulation Ergonomics Framework—HUMOSIM) with a computational cognitive architecture (the Queueing network model human processor—QN–MHP). The new system combines the features of the two separate architectures and provides new capabilities that emerge from their integration.