Search

Includes Supplementary Material, Long working hours, 24/7 shift work, restricted sleep opportunities, and circadian misalignment all lead to degraded Sailor performance and impairments in decision making. These deficiencies threaten the safety of Sailors and a unit’s mission readiness, as the recent deadly collisions of the USS Fitzgerald and USS John. S. McCain exposed. Despite the headway made by the Navy in addressing crew endurance and fatigue issues, there is a capability gap in the surface navy’s ability to systematically assess and mitigate crew fatigue during in-port and at-sea operations. It is imperative to provide operational leaders charged with ensuring peak mission readiness levels with insights into the current and predicted readiness levels of their Sailors. This thesis developed a Microsoft Excel-based scheduling decision aid capable of tracking, detecting, and quantifying human performance risk factors associated with work and rest patterns for U.S. Navy Sailors. The Scheduling Management Aid for Risk Tracking (SMART) systematically collects Sailor activity data and provides trend analysis at an individual and organizational level, arming the scheduler with critical insight necessary for better crew resource management. The prototype’s tailorable heuristics are designed to identify and quantify human performance risk, enabling leaders to better mitigate risk through data-driven decision making., Lieutenant, United States Navy, Approved for public release. distribution is unlimited