Bolton Receives Young Investigator Award from the US Army Research Laboratory

Matthew Bolton works with PhD students Adam Houser, Kylie Molinaro and Jiajun Wei in UB’s Formal Human Systems Laboratory.

Matthew Bolton works with PhD students Adam Houser, Kylie Molinaro and Jiajun Wei in UB’s Formal Human Systems Laboratory. Photo credit: The Onion Studio.

Published October 26, 2015 This content is archived.

Matthew Bolton, assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE), is a recipient of a Young Investigator Program award from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

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Bolton’s research will investigate how unanticipated human errors can contribute to failures in safety critical/complex systems, such as Army UAV operations and/or fire procedures. Failures in these systems often occur because the people using them make errors that were not anticipated by the designers.

His aim is to develop a new human error modeling system that is based on where the person deviates from the instructions or plan of action. Once completed, the model will be used to generate human errors in automated mathematical proof analyses. Engineers will be able to use these analyses to discover how human error could cause a system to fail and take corrective actions.

While the approach will initially be applied to army systems, it is generalizable and will thus have applications in medicine, aviation, the military, and other safety critical domains.

The project, entitled “Preventing Complex Failures of Human Interactive Systems with Erroneous Behavior Generation and Robust Human Task Behavior Patterns,” is funded for two years, with an option for an additional year.

Bolton, who joined the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in 2014, is director of the Formal Human Systems Laboratory. He received his PhD in systems engineering from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville in 2010.

The Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering has eighteen full-time faculty across the disciplines of operations research; human factors; and manufacturing, production, and service systems.