This paper concerns human factors that might impact the success of future maritime defense operations. In such operations, extensive networking is likely to allow large amounts of information to be shared between headquarters, ships, submarines and aircraft. Military planners anticipate that this will enhance situation awareness for their forces. Researchers at Australia's Defence Science and Technology Organisation are studying this issue using a synthetic environment (a game play simulation involving a manned virtual submarine operating within a computer generated scenario). The initial focus of this work has been to identify appropriate metrics with which to monitor performance. Here we present an attempt to employ objective situation awareness metrics. Despite some technical problems, a number of interesting findings suggest that there may be a trade off between the accuracy of operator understanding and the size of the field of view of networked sensors.
It is assumed that good situation awareness (SA) leads to good decision making, which is then expected to result in a good outcome. Despite increasing reliance on this assumption by the land force, little research has been undertaken to validate it. This study attempts to address this deficiency. SA was assessed using the Direct Questioning Technique, which elicits SA through direct questioning during play. This is an adaptation of the Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique. Responses to SA questions were compared against the ground truth of the scripted scenario. A relationship was found between SA and decision making, such that participants with a high degree of SA made high quality decisions. SA was also related to planning. However, other factors also contributed significantly to decision quality and performance. It is assumed that good SA leads to good decision making, which is then expected to result in a good outcome. Despite increasing reliance on this assumption by the land force, little research has been undertaken to validate it. This study attempts to address this deficiency through examining whether there are differences in the quality of decisions made by people of varying degrees of SA. This was done using a computer simulated reconnaissance mission, to provide the researcher with a high degree of control, and to reduce the interference of variables such as hunger and fatigue in the decision-making process. The role that planning before entering the situation plays in decision making and SA quality was also of interest. RELEASE LIMITATIONTwenty-four participants aged 18-40, from the South Australian Air Field Defence Squadron and DSTO, volunteered to engage in a scenario using the commercial-offthe-shelf game 'Operation Flashpoint'. This is a military-based tactical first-person shooter game that has been lauded as the most realistic first-person war game available. It is also scriptable, allowing the custom design of a scenario appropriate to the study. A reconnaissance scenario was scripted with the aid of a subject matter expert. It was tightly constrained such that although the participant had the freedom to choose their course of action, they had no more than three options to choose from at each decision point.Planning was assessed by administering a short questionnaire after providing the participant with the appropriate information. The questionnaire garnered their knowledge of such things as their rules of engagement, their mission statement, and possible courses of action.SA was assessed using the Direct Questioning Technique (DQT), a question and answer technique that elicits SA through direct questioning at natural breaks during play. The DQT involves asking questions from all three levels of SA, and the questions related to elements of the game environment, such as enemy locations, convoys observed, and perception of time passed. The DQT is an adaptation of the Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique.Decision making was assessed through a scoring system that at...
Proper metrics * are instrumental to help make sound balance of investment decisions and guide system development. In synthetic environment (SE) experimentation, metrics play additional but allied roles in several aspects of experimental design: guiding the choice of fidelity of representation of systems, focusing concept demonstrator development and giving structure to the experimental data collection and analysis. In order to generate C4ISR metrics, which align with the Network Centric Warfare (NCW) paradigm of producing superior effects via superior decision making through knowledge and information superiority, a five-level metrics hierarchy framework called the Knowledge Analysis Framework (KAF) has been proposed 2 . In the framework, the C4ISR System-of Systems (SoS) provides the overall transition from obtaining data on the physical world to application of battlespace effects. Components of the system provide the transitions between the intermediate levels.Measures of different aspects of system components are labelled as system performance parameters. This paper reports our work on deriving Command and Control (C2) metrics based on this framework for a specific SE experiment aimed at developing and assessing C2 system concepts for the future Australian Army. Detailed metrics have been defined against the particular problem statement. The paper describes these metrics and associated data collection methods.
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