J. van Laere

Extracting rules from expert operators to support situation awareness in maritime surveillance

In maritime surveillance, supporting operatorspsila situation awareness is a very important issue for enabling the possibility to detect anomalous behaviour. We present a user study which conceptualises knowledge to be implemented in a rule-based application aiming at supporting situation awareness. Participatory observations were used as a method for extracting operatorspsila knowledge. The result of the user study is in the form of a number of identified rules emerging from organisational factors, group thinking and individual experience. A description of the rule-based prototype is presented a long with the result from the user study. This is also discussed together with the applicability of rule based systems and how to support situation awareness.

A user study of the Impact matrix, a fusion based decision support for enhanced situation awareness

Todaypsilas asymmetric threats put new challenges on military decision making. As new technology develops we have new possibilities to support decision making in such environments. However, it is important that the tools developed take into account userspsila (commanderspsila) decision needs. This paper presents some initial user studies of Swedish commanders testing a prototype application developed to answer these new challenges introduced by asymmetric threats. The application aids commanders by supporting situation awareness in terms of providing an overview of incoming intelligence reports and displaying probabilities of future events. The user study focuses on how the tool can support commanderspsila daily decision making activities. The results indicate that the general concept could be useful for Swedish commanders and analysts, but some suggestions for improvements are made. The issues found in this study will inform the continuing evaluation of this tool.

A social simulation-game to explore future co-ordination in knowledge networks at the Amsterdam Police Force

The 32 autonomous neighbourhood teams of the Amsterdam Police Force need to utilise each others knowledge and expertise to deal with the variety and complexity of their daily work assignments. However, despite the creation of organisation wide knowledge networks, communication, co-ordination and knowledge sharing between the neighbourhood teams is disappointing. We conducted an action research to investigate how co-ordination in the knowledge networks could be improved with the help of information and communication technologies (ICTs). This article reflects on the choice of co-ordination perspectives and modelling techniques. The above problem is conceptualised and made operational in different ways in research on network co-ordination, knowledge co-ordination and co-ordination of distributed work. The article demonstrates how our initial focus on capturing quantitative measures of the co-ordination problem in a computer simulation was problematic in this case. Instead a social simulation-game that focused on the qualitative issues of this co-ordination problem was developed and played. We conclude that the choice of theoretical perspectives and modelling techniques strongly affected the results of both phases of our action research. Furthermore the article argues that more attention to qualitative issues in co-ordination is required to better understand the impact of ICT-support on co-ordination.