A situation awareness analysis scheme to identify deficiencies of complex man-machine interactions

Abstract

Abstract:This paper presents an analysis scheme which aims to support a systematic study of required situation awareness (RSA). This scheme supports identification of deficiencies of support for situation awareness (SA). Information needs are goal and task dependent and can be defined using existing cognitive task analysis (CTA) methods. RSA, however, is a subset of information needs and depends on the interaction between goals, tasks, system factors and individual factors. The analysis scheme has helped to identify that the current methods to define RSA do not support a distinction between information needs and RSA. The scheme was trialled in a nautical traffic management context as an extension to existing CTA methods. The research activities necessary to study RSA and to identify deficiencies of current support for SA in nautical traffic management context were applied. The study showed that the research set-up designed through application of the analysis scheme helped to define RSA, and that RSA is considerably context and operator dependent. Future research will focus on the potential for context-aware adaptable interface solutions to allow for RSA dependent information visualisation.Keywords: man-machine interactions; MMI; required situation awareness; information needs; situation awareness requirements; analysis scheme; deficiencies; nautical traffic management; information intensive task environment; informing.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: van Doorn, E., Rusák, Z. and Horváth, I. (2017) This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled 'A systematic approach to addressing the influence of man-machine interaction on situation awareness' presented at

Information engineering for developing and testing coherent, integrated and context-dependent user interfaces

“…Van Doorn et al (2017) showed that proper information visualization is required to allow operators to correctly access and process the information presented by the systems and to obtain the necessary SA. More specifically, the collected research data indicated that differences in the form of information visualization by the different systems used for the same tasks may lead to errors in SA.…”

“…Therefore, designing an integrated UI requires defining information needs as sets per task. In Van Doorn et al (2017), we described task analysis steps required to generate an information needs overview. As in the case of coherent interfaces, the information contents (pieces of information) required for each task and the overlap of information (i.e., the information which is needed for multiple tasks) can be specified by the means of set theory, see Fig.…”

“…To retain safe and efficient traffic flows, the focus of traffic management is shifting from local traffic control to corridor traffic management (Van Doorn et al 2017). Consequently, traffic management operators require situation awareness (SA) of a larger area of control and a longer time span.…”

“…Design of effective visualization of large amounts of information requires designers to systematically identify information needs per task (Van Doorn et al 2017). Goalmeans analysis along with abstraction hierarchy (AH) is helpful in defining relationships between information elements, which should explicitly be represented in the UI design (Ham and Yoon 2001).…”

“…Nautical traffic management shares important characteristics with other command and control tasks, such as aviation, air traffic control, process control and traffic operations (Van Doorn et al 2017). In all of these cases, operators work in a dynamic environment where they need to pursue multiple goals simultaneously.…”