Managing Human Factors in Automated Vehicle Development: Towards Challenges and Practices

TL;DR

This paper investigates how human factors knowledge is currently incorporated into agile autonomous vehicle development and why it is challenging. It uses semi-structured interviews with ten industry professionals in Sweden to identify current HF practices in requirements derivation, communication, and integration, revealing a heavy focus on HMI and limited cross-domain HF involvement. The study highlights organizational barriers such as a shortage of HF experts, weak knowledge management, and misalignment with sprint-driven workflows, offering practical implications for establishing protocols and organizational structures to better embed HF throughout agile AV development. The findings aim to guide researchers and industry practitioners toward safer, more usable, and better-accepted AV systems by bridging HF considerations with agile development processes.

Abstract

Due to the technical complexity and social impact, automated vehicle (AV) development challenges the current state of automotive engineering practice. Research shows that it is important to consider human factors (HF) knowledge when developing AVs to make them safe and accepted. This study explores the current practices and challenges of the automotive industries for incorporating HF requirements during agile AV development. We interviewed ten industry professionals from several Swedish automotive companies, including HF experts and AV engineers. Based on our qualitative analysis of the semi-structured interviews, a number of current approaches for communicating and incorporating HF knowledge into agile AV development and associated challenges are discussed. Our findings may help to focus future research on issues that are critical to effectively incorporate HF knowledge into agile AV development.