Maybe it sounds like the making for an unpopular reality television show
-- a program that simulates all the workplace business processes and interactions,
from the fussy fax machine to the time spent responding to emails.
What the program called Brahms does, though, is help transform the workplace
into a more productive and efficient environment.
Brahms is a multi-agent modeling and simulation environment that improves
our understanding of interaction between people and systems. The software
is a work system design and modeling tool that brings into view the roles
people and technology play in how a job actually gets done. It puts together
the overt and tacit interactions to produce information people can use
to develop technology that will enhance work performance.
For example, how do people gather data that must be input to a computer
tool? How do these people share its output? Bill Clancey, the project
lead, said, "Instead of focusing on the screen design or keystrokes,
we consider how personal knowledge is called into play: Who is participating?
How is that choice made? And how does it affect what is input to the program
and how the results are interpreted and acted upon?"
The Brahms environment consists of a number of software tools: a multi-agent
programming language for modeling people's behaviors, geographical environment,
movements, communications, systems and tools, as well as system behaviors
and how technology might be inserted.
"It's understanding the differences between people and their environment
and bringing them together," said project manager Maarten Sierhuis.
"It's based on the scientific study of communications, to help rather
than replace people."
The tool is being researched in context with the Mars Exploration Rover
(MER) mission operations, as well as other areas of space exploration,
including the International Space Station, a Mars habitat and surface
exploration vehicles.
Imagine starting a company for just three months that employs 240 highly
skilled scientists and engineers who will work around the clock to manage
a new space mission. That's MER. Never has NASA managed a planetary rover
exploration mission involving so many collaborators. The days will be
tightly scheduled, requiring order among the hundreds of team members.
For the 120 scientists, each day the job requires analyzing volumes of
existing and incoming data to determine a set of priorities for the rovers
and build plans to achieve a goal. The same number of engineers will translate
the scientists' goals into instructions for the rovers and will uplink
the information.
Current research involves how the Brahms model can be used to develop
an actual workflow system for mission operations, based on the Brahms
agent technology and models of mission operations. The Brahms team plans
to observe mission operations at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and
is hoping to assist in designing and implementing a surface mission operation
scheduled for 2009.
The tool could save the space agency money, said computer scientist Chin
Seah. "You don't want to build a facility that you won't use or build
technology that you won't use."
Brahms is the result of 10 years of research by co-principal investigators
Clancey and Sierhuis, both of the Work Systems Design and Evaluation Group,
in how understanding the interactions of people and their environment
can improve the design of work processes.
NASA's Computing, Information and Communications Technology Program is
funding Brahms.
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