Synergetic Model of Situational Awareness of a Human Operator in Ergatic Control Systems of Mobile Objects

Abstract

At present, researches of ergatic control systems for moving objects, in which an important role is assigned to the human operator, are of particular relevance. The effectiveness of the functioning of such systems largely depends on the state of the human operator and, first of all, on his situational awareness. Insufficient or inadequate awareness of the operator about the situation in such systems is one of the main factors of accidents associated with human error. Therefore, the task of creating models of professional activity of a human operator, including models of his situational awareness, is urgent. It is shown that situational awareness is based on mental models of a human operator. Their adequacy depends on many subjective characteristics (factors) peculiar to a person, for example, his intelligence, mental state, accumulated experience. Mathematical formalization will reduce the subjective component in the formation of situational awareness. It is noted that important properties of situational awareness of the human operator are associativity and ranking of information depending on the context of the problem being solved. Therefore, situational awareness provides perception of the current situation and allows you to make the right decisions in response to certain threats. The levels of implementation of situational awareness in a human operator are given. A feature of the first level is the need for joint processing of a large amount of heterogeneous information in order to identify significant facts and critical information about external objects. The task of the second level is to form a holistic picture of the situation, which is based on existing knowledge and previous experience. The third, highest level of understanding of the situation is based on the ability of a person to predict the actions of moving objects and the consequences of these actions. It is proposed to form a model of situational awareness based on Haken’s synergetic approach. Like most other intelligent systems, the synergetic Haken’s model includes learning and recognition processes. A description of the process of recognizing a critical situation using a trained synergetic model is given. The value of the attention parameter, which characterizes the importance of a specific characteristic of the state of the controlled object in the ergatic system, is noted. The associative properties of the synergetic model and its ability to rank the initial information in the process of threat analysis during helicopter control are investigated.