Modelling Situation Awareness Information for Naval Decision Support Design

In today's complex, dynamic, and changing military environments, supporting Situation Awareness (SA) of operators is a prerequisite for situation- and task-adequate decision making and action. SA refers to information on three levels that represent relevant elements of the operator environment, element patterns describing complex mission situations, and projections of future states and dynamics of elements. A means for supporting the SA of operators is the adaptive knowledge-based user interface. To develop such interfaces, information on the three different SA levels that operators need to perform their tasks must be specified and modeled. One source from which that information can be acquired are scenarios that have to be developed anyway for system design and operator training. For specifying relevant SA information, a model of the problem domain has been developed that comprises the True World of scenarios, the Sensed Word of detected tracks, and the Deduced World of concluded track information. To uniformly describe these different worlds, an object-oriented approach has been applied that is based on static and dynamic scenario and track objects that are specified mathematically. Attributes and operations of track objects constitute elements and patterns of relevant SA information to be identified. Additionally, the described mathematical model of track objects constitutes the basis for developing a software specification with the object-oriented Unified Modeling Language (UML). Using a Navy Anti-Air Warfare scenario as an example, the application of the developed modeling approach is demonstrated in detail. (2 tables, 5 figures, 12 refs.)
See also ADM001577. Presented at the RTO HFM Symposium on "The Role of Humans in Intelligent and Automated Systems," held in Warsaw, Poland, on 7-9 Oct 2002. Published in report number RTO-MP-088. The original document contains color images.