Coordinated Team Performance in Complex Opertional Systems

The focus of this SBIR effort will be on developing a design and analysis tool to be applicable in a wide variety of military C2 and Decision Support System (DSS) applications comprising complex team-machine systems wherein success depends heavily on the team's ability to efficiently collaborate in a fast-paced,multi-paces, multi-person, digitized environment. Given this focus, the objective of this Phase I proposal is to demonstrate the utility of a robust, decision-centered, Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) methodology as a powerful approach to analyze team collaboration in a complex military domain. Specifically, the focus of Phase I will be to extend the state-of-the-art in CTA by applying a function-based Cognitive Task Analysis (Roth and Mumaw, 1995) to a complex, dynamic, military C2 domain. This function-based CTA will develop an explicit representation of critical goals, supporting processes, as well as critical information and collaboration requirements. This representation will form the critical underlying framework for an assessment of team decision making effectiveness, modifications to crew structure, information transfer requirements, as well as the development of revolutionary human-system interface design technologies to dramactically improve team decision making performance. Phase II, then, will focus on building this design and analysis team CTA tool. This will take the form of two distince levels of effort. First, the proposed CTA tool will be applied to another team domain to explore its applicability to other complex military collaborative environments, since the results of a function-based CTA are entrenched in the semantics and complexities of the target domain. Second, the development effort will focus on addressing the critical needs for this team CTA tool to be used as means for supporting the design of human-machine interfaces to support team collaboration. This is expected to include issues such as scenario generation, collaboration requirements, team decision support/HCI innovations, and training for skill acquisition.