N093-193 TITLE: Shared Situation Awareness (SSA) Measurement

TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Information Systems, Ground/Sea Vehicles, Battlespace

ACQUISITION PROGRAM: Undersea Warfare – Decision Support System (USW-DSS)

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals, their country of origin, and what tasks each would accomplish in the statement of work in accordance with section 3.5.b.(7) of the solicitation.

OBJECTIVE: Innovative tool to measure human performance capacity in command and control, situational awareness and tactical decision-making scenarios.

DESCRIPTION: Cutting-edge technology is needed to present a way for naval decision makers to be removed from the "real world" about which they must make decisions that are intended to change a situation. Their mental models, which provide the basis for interpreting the systems representations of the situation, are constructed with information from decision support systems and their unique personal training/experience. The information provided by the systems to represent the actual situations is used by humans to build and maintain their mental assessment of the situation. The work of Endsley and her colleges has added substantially to our understanding of the ways in which human mental models of a situation are built, maintained and used to gain an understand the most salient elements of a situation for the purpose of decision making that are intended to have a desired change effect on it. Similarly, work done by Kline and his associates have increased our understanding of the "sense-making" cognitive activity required of humans to translate information about a condition into mental models that are reliable enough to use for making critical military decisions. Similarly, work in the development of ways to assess Situational Awareness (SA) such as the Real-time Communications, Situational Awareness and Cognitive Performance Assessment System are increasing our capability to study SA concepts and issues that could help improve the utility of decision support technology. Another aspect in developing a SA measurement model, McGuinness states, is the differences of objective and subjective measurement, "which grossly differentiates between SA as revealed by objective queries (e.g., which target is highest priority?) and SA as revealed by subjective measures (e.g., rate your SA on a scale of 1-7). There can be real differences between what an operator "knows" (having assimilated or inferred the relevant items of information) and what he *thinks* he knows overall. "An important aspect of maintaining SA is associated with the cognitive workload placed on humans who are required to build and maintain their personal mental models of the situation on which they will base the decisions and we are beginning to understand that cognitive workload is more determined by how often the decision makers must revise their models to accommodate new or ambiguous information or, if that becomes too demanding in time and effort, to simply ignore the new information. As noted by Nofi, for a group to develop a shared awareness requires three key elements, first building individual situational awareness, secondly, sharing individual awareness (which requires awareness of other’s actions), and finally developing a shared situational awareness or the overlapping of multiple individual models.

Currently, there is no capacity for defining and analyzing human cognitive workloads as it pertains to a thorough understanding of Situational Awareness and decision-making. As navy capabilities continue to improve and become increasingly more automated, the human cognitive process and response mechanisms will continue to be a necessary component in defining future navy needs. As such, the development of a measurement tool with objective metrics for improving situational awareness is needed that will benefit both training and the development of future command and control (C2) and decision support systems.

PHASE I: Conduct the needed R&D to identify and define the tools, standards and processes to support a system of Shared Situation Awareness (SSA) metrics and measures. Provide the analysis for a candidate approach and document the findings and recommendations.

PHASE II: Complete the additional R&D required to develop and demonstrate a prototype tool that will incorporate viable candidates to support Shared Situation Awareness (SSA) metrics and measurement. Provide the assessment of the total impact for the Navy’s improvement in decision support systems and training.

PHASE III: Integrate the Shared Situation Awareness (SSA) tool into requisite programs of record and decision support systems that require improvement in Situational Awareness.

PRIVATE SECTOR COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL/DUAL-USE APPLICATIONS: Innovative ways to measure shared situational awareness can benefit commercial interests that require data strategies for collaborative decision making.

REFERENCES:
1. Albert A. Nofi, Defining and Measuring Shared Situational Awareness, CRM D0002895.A1/Final, November 2000 Center for Naval Analyses Alexandria, Virginia

2. Endsley, M. R., Bolte, B., & Jones, D. G. Designing for Situation Awareness: An approach to human-centered design. London: Taylor & Francis (2003)

3. Gary Klein, Brian Moon, Robert R. Hoffman, "Making Sense of Sensemaking 2: A Macrocognitive Model," IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 21, no. 5, pp. 88-92, Sep/Oct, 2006

4. Bolstad, Cheryl A., Foltz, Peter W., "Real-time Communications, Situational Awareness and Cognitive Performance Assessment System" Presentation to the DoD Human Factors Technical Advisory Group, November 3, 2008

5. Quantitative Analysis of Situational Awareness (QUASA) Barry McGuinness (Principal Scientist)(2004)

KEYWORDS: Network, Situational Awareness, Command and Control, Cognition, Meta-Cognition

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