HSI Issues in Composable Information & Service Environments

Two important Navy trends are agile, rapid response operations and reduced manning. These trends require fewer warfighters to access and assimilate more information about more tasks, to multi-task, and supervise automated and semi-automated systems. Net-centric systems help by providing access to tremendous amounts of data from many systems and reach-back assets, but these data must be organized and harnessed to exploit them fully: to manage attention and situation awareness across multiple tasks, switch among tasks and recover from task interruptions, and collaborate to solve problems and share workload. The Janus project proposes to address these concerns by explicitly supporting supervision and multi-tasking. Janus provides displays that present mission and system status information and significant changes efficiently so that they can be assessed within a brief glance while continuing to perform primary tasks. The Janus displays lie on the periphery of usersÕ workspaces where users can scan them quickly to survey mission status. The Janus project also provides a toolkit and design process for composing appropriate supervisory display. This design process significantly increases the generality of the Janus approach so that its superior designs for supporting supervision can be applied readily to many domains.