Distributed Situation Awareness

Having an accurate understanding of what is going on is a key commodity for teams working within military systems. 'Situation awareness' (SA) is the term that is used within human factors circles to describe the level of awareness that operators have of the situation that they are engaged in; it focuses on how operators develop and maintain a sufficient understanding of 'what is going on' in order to achieve success in task performance. Over the past two decades, the construct has become a fundamental theme within the areas of system design and evaluation and has received considerable attention from the human factors research community. Despite this, there is still considerable debate over how SA operates in complex collaborative systems and how SA achievement and maintenance is best supported through system, procedure and interface design. This book focuses on the recently developed concept of distributed situation awareness, which takes a systems perspective on the concept and moves the focus on situation awareness out of the heads of individual operators and on to the overall joint cognitive system consisting of human and technological agents. Situation awareness is viewed as an emergent property of collaborative systems, something that resides in the interaction between elements of the system and not in the heads of individual operators working in that system. The first part of the book presents a comprehensive review and critique of existing SA theory and measurement approaches, following which a novel model for complex collaborative systems, the distributed SA model, and a new modelling procedure, the propositional network approach, are outlined and demonstrated. The next part focuses on real-world applications of the model and modelling procedure, and presents four case studies undertaken in the land warfare, multinational warfare and energy distribution domains. Each case study is described in terms of the domain in question, the methodology employed, and the findings derived in relation to situation awareness theory. The third and final part of the book then concentrates on theoretical development, and uses the academic literature and the findings from the case study applications to validate and extend the distributed SA model described at the beginning of the book. In closing, the utility of the distributed SA model and modeling procedure are outlined and a series of initial guidelines for supporting distributed SA through system design are articulated.

How can we design transport environments that cater to the situation awareness needs of different end-users? This book answers this question by showcasing how state-of-the-art human factors theory and methods can be used to understand how situation awareness differs across drivers, cyclists, motorcyclists, and pedestrians and creates new designs that cater to these diverse situation awareness needs. Written by experts in the field and based on a major program of work funded by the Australian Research Council, this book outlines the distributed situation awareness model and provides practical guidance on how to study situation awareness naturalistically and how to create designs that support, rather than hinder, situation awareness. The book closes by outlining outline a generic framework to support similar applications in other areas, and discusses future applications in areas such as vehicle automation, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. Features Challenges traditional road safety analysis, design processes and conventions Outlines a novel on-road study methodology for analyzing naturalistic interactions among drivers, cyclists, motorcyclists and pedestrians Presents a review of state-of-the-art situation awareness theory and methods Provides practical guidance on a series of human factors methods Describes a framework to support the design of transport environments Evaluates new intersection concepts that encompass features designed to prevent collisions at intersections

Enhancing Situation Awareness (SA) is a major design goal for projects in many fields, including aviation, ground transportation, air traffic control, nuclear power, and medicine, but little information exists in an integral format to support this goal. Designing for Situation Awareness helps designers understand how people acquire and interpret information in complex settings and recognize the factors that undermine this process. Designing to support operator SA reduces the incidence of human error, which has been found to occur largely due to failures in SA. Whereas many previous human factors efforts have focused on design at the perceptual and surface feature level, SA-oriented design focuses on the operator's information needs and cognitive processes as they juggle to integrate information from many sources and achieve multiple competing goals. Thus it addresses design from a system's perspective. By applying theoretical and empirical information on SA to the system design process, human factors practitioners can create designs to support SA across a wide variety of domains and design issues. This book serves as a helpful reference to that end.

This book examines the human factors issues associated with the development, testing, and implementation of helmet-mounted display technology in the 21st Century Land Warrior System. Because the framework of analysis is soldier performance with the system in the full range of environments and missions, the book discusses both the military context and the characteristics of the infantry soldiers who will use the system. The major issues covered include the positive and negative effects of such a display on the local and global situation awareness of the individual soldier, an analysis of the visual and psychomotor factors associated with each design feature, design considerations for auditory displays, and physical sources of stress and the implications of the display for affecting the soldier's workload. The book proposes an innovative approach to research and testing based on a three-stage strategy that begins in the laboratory, moves to controlled field studies, and culminates in operational testing.

This book discusses various aspects, challenges, and solutions for developing systems-of-systems for situation awareness, using applications in the domain of maritime safety and security. Topics include advanced, multi-objective visualization methods for situation awareness, stochastic outlier selection, rule-based anomaly detection, an ontology-based event model for semantic reasoning, new methods for semi-automatic generation of adapters bridging communication gaps, security policies for systems-of-systems, trust assessment, and methods to deal with the dynamics of systems-of-systems in run-time monitoring, testing, and diagnosis. Architectural considerations for designing information-centric systems-of-systems such as situation awareness systems, and an integrated demonstrator implementing many of the investigated aspects, complete the book.

A comprehensive overview of different approaches to the measurement of situation awareness in experimental and applied setting, this book directly tackles the problem of ensuring that system designs and training programs are effective at promoting situation awareness. It is the first book to provide a all-inclusive coverage of situation awareness and its measurement. Topics addressed provide a detailed analysis of the use of a wide variety of techniques for measuring situation awareness and situation assessment processes. It provides a rich resource for engineers and human factors psychologists involved in designing and evaluating systems in many domains.

In 2000, the Conference on Automation joined forces with a partner group on situation awareness (SA). The rising complexity of systems demands that one can be aware of a large range of environmental and task-based stimulation in order to match what is done with what has to be done. Thus, SA and automation-based interaction fall naturally together and this conference is the second embodiment of this union. Moving into the 21st century, further diversification of the applications of automation will continue--for example, the revolution in genetic technology. Given the broad nature of this form of human-machine interaction, it is vital to apply past lessons to map a future for the symbiotic relationship between humans and the artifacts they create. It is as part of this ongoing endeavor that the present volume is offered.