ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes the individual Human factors/ergonomics (HFE) specialties, with emphasis on two: macroergonomics or, as it is often called, organizational development and management; and human reliability (HR) or, as the author prefers to call it, quantitative prediction. He deals with the bald statement that HR should function as a model for HFE quantitative prediction. Efforts at quantitative prediction began quite early in the history of HFE largely because of the military’s concern for the negative effect of human errors on system performance. Governmental interest in the form of funding and regulation of system development has had a great effect on HFE, but primarily in practice rather than research. The analysis of technological involvement was based on two criteria: the extent to which measurement described performance in the operational environment, and/or the sophistication of the measurement apparatus. Effective macroergonomic design drives much of the microergonomic design of the system components with the system’s overall structure.
