Control Task Analysis for Applied Settings

Abstract

As part of ongoing research at DRDC Atlantic, Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) is being used to design enhanced capabilities for naval command and control systems. Typically, the first two steps (work domain analysis (WDA) and control task analysis (CTA)) are conducted, followed by the identification of design seeds for the development of new system concepts. To date, there has been little guidance in the literature regarding how to perform both WDA and CTA, although many practitioners have performed WDA. Fewer have performed CTA, so the interested analyst has few examples to draw from, in particular for studies in industry. The work discussed in this paper involved the use of CTA to analyse scenario-based data in order to characterize expert performance in control tasks. By understanding expert performance according to a decision ladder (DL) model, it is possible to accurately support the required level of performance in complex, dynamic, open domains. This paper presents an overview of the work and includes some examples of the analyses.