Guy Walker

Is situation awareness all in the mind

This paper addresses the fundamental discipline theoretic question of whether situation awareness is a phenomenon best described by psychology, engineering or systems ergonomics. Each of these disciplines places a different emphasis on the notion of what situation awareness is and how it manifests itself. The approach from psychology places situation awareness as something that can only exist in the minds of people in a system. This means that the unit of analysis is the individual and that team situation awareness is the summation of individual situation awareness. The engineering perspective puts situation awareness in the world, represented in the artefacts and objects that people use. This means that the unit of analysis is the things that people interact with. Finally, the systems ergonomics perspective places emphasis on the interaction between people and their artefacts in the world, to propose that situation awareness functions like distributed cognition. This means that the unit of analysis is the whole socio-technical system. Each of these perspectives is presented and compared with reference to studies in aviation and other domains. It is concluded that the distributed cognition perspective of situation awareness offers the most comprehensive explanation of the phenomena observed in socio-technical systems. Socio-technical systems theory allows exploration of the social and technical sub-systems independently, which offers a theoretical framework for aligning the three views of situation awareness.

Is it really better to share? Distributed situation awareness and its implications for collaborative system design

Despite well over two decades of academic research, situation awareness in complex collaborative environments remains ambiguous. Recent systems-based models of distributed situation awareness have attempted to address this; however, further effort is required in clarifying exactly how situation awareness operates in complex socio-technical systems. One pertinent issue regards what the ‘distributed’ situational picture looks like from the perspective of each component of the system and how it differs amongst team members. Is the same picture ‘shared’ across team members, or do they have different, but compatible, views on the situation? This article tackles this question by presenting a distributed cognition-inspired systems-based model of situation awareness in collaborative systems, along with an accompanying modelling approach, the propositional network methodology. Following this, the paper focuses explicitly on the models sub-concept of compatible situation awareness and uses case study evidence to demonstrate how awareness is distributed between, and differs between, team members. This view is then compared to existing team situation awareness views and the implications for collaborative system design are discussed.

Using the Decision-Ladder to Add a Formative Element to Naturalistic Decision-Making Research

This article presents a prototypical model of how decision making can proceed within an environment, independent of situation or actor. Based upon Rasmussens decision-ladder, an approach for capturing formative descriptions of existing decision-making processes is presented. The example of land-based combat identification is used to demonstrate this approach. Two new representations are introduced to aid domain understanding and support the design of decision support tools. The first maps the links between information elements, system states, and options. The second clusters elements in the decision-making process in terms of their location in the world. The approach presented is not intended to replace existing decision-making analysis techniques, rather, based on similar data collection procedures, its aim is to compliment them with a more formative integrant. By considering decision making independently from actor and context, a flexible approach is presented that is applicable complex sociotechnical systems.

Decisions, Decisions … and Even More Decisions: Evaluation of a Digitized Mission Support System in the Land Warfare Domain

Digitized mission support systems are currently being introduced in the military arena. The projected benefits include quicker, better informed, more efficient decision making by the teams using them; however, these claims are often made without appropriate scientific testing. A live operational field trial of a land warfare digital mission support system was observed, and an integrated framework of Human Factors methods was used to evaluate performance with the mission support system. The findings indicated that, as a corollary of various flaws associated with the digital system, decision making was found to be more difficult, more drawn out, and more susceptible to error. Rather than augment the decision-making process, in some cases these flaws were seen to create further decision-making requirements for users. In closing, the implications of this study and the wider naturalistic decision making literature for the design of digitized mission support systems are discussed.

Using Work Domain Analysis to Evaluate the Impact of Digitization on Command and Control

This paper introduces a new approach for evaluating the impact of technological change on complex sociotechnical systems. The approach uses Work Domain Analysis as a theoretical base for extracting the key factors that influence system performance. The process has been designed to be expeditious, both in terms of construction and data collection. The approach uses the opinion of subject matter experts to evaluate the impact of each of the abstraction hierarchy nodes on system performance. This approach was used to evaluate the effects of digitization within land based military headquarters, at brigade and battlegroup levels. The proposed approach proved sensitive enough to reveal clear differences between the old analogue and new digital system. The description of the same system at a number of levels of abstraction allows the analyst to develop a high level rating of the system as well as understanding of the key factors that have influenced this opinion.

An Empirical Evaluation of Network Centric Team Organisation versus Hierarchical Team Organisation

Traditional hierarchical command and control was pitted against a network centric alternative on a common task played thirty times by two teams. Multiple regression was used to undertake a simple form of time series analysis. Whilst the network centric condition ended up being slightly slower than its hierarchical counterpart, it was able to balance and optimise three other factors: team cohesion, enemies neutralized and attrition.

How Network Enabled Capability Changes the Emergent Properties of Military Command and Control

EAST (Event Analysis for Systemic Teamwork) is an integrated methods approach that can be used to describe systems level ‘emergent properties’ that arise from complex socio-technical systems. This paper reports on the application of the method to a military command and control scenario. The focus is on the technical and structural determinates of the emergent property of Systemic Situation Awareness (SSA) in cases where Networked Enabled Capability (NEC) is largely absent (e.g. the military domain) compared to examples in which it is present (e.g. the civilian domain).

Distributed Situation Awareness in Command and Control: A Case Study in the Energy Distribution Domain

Distributed Situation Awareness (DSA), in terms of structure and knowledge content, distribution, sharing and usage, has important implications for command and control infrastructure design, network configuration, performance and efficiency. Despite this, theory and methods for evaluating DSA in complex sociotechnical systems are currently lacking. This article presents a novel methodology for assessing DSA, along with a case study of DSA in the energy distribution domain. The Event Analysis of Systemic Teamwork (EAST) methodology was used to analyse three scenarios undertaken on a major UK electricity distribution network. In conclusion, an analysis of propositional knowledge networks indicated that DSA effectively ‘coupled’ the command and control networks observed. DSA comprised ‘activated’ knowledge objects that were held by, and shared between, the agents involved. Further, analysis of knowledge usage indicated that each agent involved possessed disparate but complementary levels of situation awareness during task performance.

The Role of the Abstraction Hierarchy in Team Performance

This paper reports on a study into the Levels of Abstraction Hierarchy (LOAH). The original proposition for the LOAH was that it depicted the levels of system representation, working from functional purpose through to physical form to determine causes of a malfunction, or from physical form to functional purpose to determine purpose for system function. The LOAH has been widely used throughout human supervisory control research to explain individual behaviour, but most control rooms comprise teams. The research sought to determine if the LOAH could be used to describe human supervisory control teams. A series of interviews were conducted in an energy distribution company. The results favour the LOAH, but suggest that people in the team are predominately operating at different levels of system representation, depending upon their team role.

A Novel Integration of Human Factors Methods to Analyse C4i Activity; A Chemical Incident Case Study Carried Out with the UK Fire Service

This paper presents an integration of seven human factors techniques into a comprehensive task and knowledge based methodology. The case study demonstrates that the proposed methodology can be successfully applied to the analysis of command and control (C4) teams and shows how each of the methods interface with each other to produce; a process based overview using an enhanced form of Operation Sequence Diagram (OSD∗), and a knowledge based overview using a Propositional Network. This paper demonstrates how the methodology enables key constructs within C4 domains to be captured for the purpose of designing future systems.