Enhancing human perspectives in CPS models: Application to collaborative problem-solving in translational medicine

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) have been developed for providing seamless, resilient and high-fidelity services in areas such as manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, transportation and everyday living. Yet, conceptual and methodological frameworks of CPS that effectively incorporate human perspectives have not been well addressed in research and practice. The success of system design can only be achieved when all stakeholders can mentally and behaviorally position the system in the complex environments and situations by forming user knowledge and meanings through the system lifecycle. Such close human-system collaboration in CPS would enable the real-world system performance such as adaptivity, robustness and resilience in dynamic environments. The goal of this research is to enhance human perspectives by introducing a semiotic framework for representing different aspects of human and organizational meaning formation. It also intends to explore how the semiotic approach can be integrated with Human System Integration (HSI), CPS or Cyber Physical Human Systems (CPHS) methodologies to further enhance human perspectives in CPS lifecycles by transdisciplinary approaches. The paper then introduces an early stage of the project that applies the approach to represent a collaborative problem-solving infrastructure for clinical research process innovation in a multi-institutional translational medicine organization.