Engineering Control Human Performance Tool to Enhance Situational Awareness

"Reductions in crew sizes and the increased use of autonomous machinery control have caused the crewmember to become more of a supervisory controller, where a computer makes complex transformations on system data to produce integrated (chunked) displays forthe human, or retransforms crewmember commands to generate detailed control actions. In this environment, it is critical for humans to know how and when to intervene. When humans do not attend to the information display or fail to recognize that statuschanges shown in the display require intervention, or when cognitive workload is so high that they miss a critical signal, they are not maintaining adequate situational awareness. Therefore, it is imperative to evaluate display/controller interaction todetermine whether the human can reasonably maintain adequate situational awareness to prevent omissions and errors. This project will design and prototype a tool that can be used by HSI professionals to identify tasks that have a high potential for humanoverload and error. The proposed tool can be iteratively used to design and evaluate the interfaces that provide information in shipboard supervisory control systems to maximize the probability that the operator will maintain adequate situationalawareness and respond appropriately. The issues that are currently driving the acquisition of military and commercial hardware systems are those that revolve around personnel costs, system pe