Development of a Holistic Cockpit Design and Performance Evaluation Methodology

When optimizing the design of a modern aircraft cockpit, whether crewed or remotely piloted, many factors can influence human operators. Various evaluation metrics are commonly used to assess how well individual aspects of a cockpit system accommodate the needs of the pilot and affect flight performance. This research combines a number of existing individual methods into a proposed holistic metric for aircraft cockpit evaluation to assist end users including pilots, aircrew, and flight test engineers, as well as designers and systems engineers. Previous studies have identified relevant metrics used in cockpit design and performance and organized them into categories representative of various aspects pertaining to cockpit design and performance. The current suite of evaluation methodologies, while individually effective, fails to support integrated design and performance in taking a “cockpit as-a-whole” approach to permit a systematic, holistic trade space evaluation. In order to address this recognized gap, this work proposes a novel methodology that aggregates a suite of existing metrics into an algorithm for holistically evaluating aircraft cockpit design and performance. The metrics were synthesized into a comprehensive, quantitative, relative Cockpit Rating Scale, and incorporates weighting factors that allow individualized tailoring of the output as desired for specific use cases.