Human Systems Integration in Netted Systems: Support for Watch Turnover

As new technologies are developed and implemented in US Navy programs and systems, it becomes increasingly important to consider the warfighter in the system to determine the impact that new systems designs will have on warfighter performance in areas such as manpower requirements, workload and situation awareness. With the increasing advent of netted systems and the associated increase in bandwidth, data flow can easily become overwhelming to tactical decision makers. This problem is especially acute at watch turnover, when an oncoming watchstander must rapidly come up to speed in developing situation awareness (SA) across three levels - perception, comprehension and projection - on the current tactical situation. By applying an SA-Oriented Design methodology and 50 SA design principles developed from sound scientific data to this problem, new solutions can be developed and tested which will provide consistent and efficient information flow to allow the warfighter, even in the first minutes of watchstanding, to rapidly develop the higher levels of SA that yield sound tactical decision making. Taking a structured, proven approach, the TAOs SA requirements will be identified using a Goal Directed Task Analysis, which will provide the foundation for subsequent development of prototype intelligent agents and user interface design.