Engineering safe human-autonomy teaming using STPA-coordination
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-14-2025
Abstract
In contested and complex air combat environments, safe coordination between decision agents is paramount. While the Department of Defense is developing Artificially Intelligent (AI) agents to perform air combat, there are limited methods to design safe coordination between human pilots and collaborative autonomous wingmen. System-Theoretic Process Analysis extended for Coordination (STPA-Coordination) is a novel analysis method that addresses the limitation. This paper presents research in the application of STPA-Coordination to model and design the Loyal Wingman concept. The research is the first to apply STPA-Coordination to Human-AI teaming in the Air Dominance mission with a focus on weapons engagement decisions. The results showcase a systems-theoretic design framework useful to 1) understand human-AI coordination interactions and 2) to ultimately engineer flawed coordination out of the system before accidents occur.
Source Publication
Safety Science (ISSN 0925-7535)
Recommended Citation
Pennington, E. S., Johnson, K. E., Hobbs, K. L., & Colombi, J. M. (2026). Engineering safe human-autonomy teaming using STPA-coordination. Safety Science, 193, 107011. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2025.107011
Comments
This subscription-access article was published online by Elsevier in October 2025 as an article of Safety Science, ahead of inclusion in Volume 193 of that journal, to be issued in January 2026.