The construct of situation awareness (SA) has become a core theme within the human factors (HF) research community. Consequently, there have been numerous attempts to develop reliable and valid measures of SA. Despite this, it is apparent that there are a lack of techniques that have been developed specifically for the assessment of SA in C4i (command, control, communication, computers and intelligence) environments.During the design, development and evaluation of novel systems, technology and procedures, valid and reliable situation awareness measurement techniques are required for the assessment of individual and team SA. SA is assessed in order to determine the improvements (or in some cases decrements) resulting from proposed design and technological interventions. The following paper presents a review of existing situation awareness measurement techniques conducted in order to assess their suitability for use in the assessment of SA in C4i environments. Seventeen SA measures were evaluated against a set of HF methods criteria. It was concluded that current SA measurement techniques are inadequate for use in the assessment of SA in C4i environments, and a multiple-measure approach utilising different approaches is recommended.
The purpose of this paper is to propose foundations for a theory of situation awareness based on the analysis of interactions between agents (i.e., both human and nonhuman) in subsystems. This approach may help promote a better understanding of technology-mediated interaction in systems, as well as helping in the formulation of hypotheses and predictions concerning distributed situation awareness. It is proposed that agents within a system each hold their own situation awareness which may be very different from (although compatible with) other agents. It is argued that we should not always hope for, or indeed want, sharing of this awareness, as different system agents have different purposes. This view marks situation awareness as a 1
C4i is defined as the management infrastructure needed for the execution of a common goal supported by multiple agents in multiple locations and technology. In order to extract data from complex and diverse C4i scenarios a descriptive methodology called Event Analysis for Systemic Teamwork (EAST) has been developed. With over 90 existing ergonomics methodologies already available, the approach taken was to integrate a hierarchical task analysis, a coordination demand analysis, a communications usage diagram, a social network analysis, and the critical decision method. The outputs of these methods provide two summary representations in the form of an enhanced operation sequence diagram and a propositional network. These offer multiple overlapping perspectives on key descriptive constructs including who the agents are in a scenario, when tasks occur, where agents are located, how agents collaborate and communicate, what information is used, and what knowledge is shared. The application of these methods to live data drawn from the UK rail industry demonstrates how alternative scenarios can be compared on key metrics, how multiple perspectives on the same data can be taken, and what further detailed insights can be extracted. The ultimate aim of EAST is, by applying it across a number of scenarios in different civil and military domains, to provide data to develop generic models of C4i activity and to improve the design of systems aimed at enhancing this management infrastructure.
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