Decision Making in the AEGIS Combat Information Center

Abstract

This paper presents the methods and findings of a study designed to identify the decision requirements for anti-air warfare officers in the Combat Information Center of an AEGIS cruiser. Decision requirements include the decisions that systems operators make, the cognitive strategies they invoke to make these decisions, and the cues and factors essential for making these decisions. These requirements can be used to design training, human-computer interfaces, or decision supports. The researchers adopted a method based on Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) research. NDM describes how people make decisions in real-world settings under conditions of time pressure, high risk, and ambiguity. This paper describes a process for obtaining data necessary for describing these decision processes. The central method is a semi-structured interview method, the Critical Decision method (CDM). CDM was used to interview 31 experienced AEGIS personnel resulting in 14 incidents that reflect real problems experienced by the operational fleet. Analysis of these incidents revealed 183 decisions. Of these, 103 concerned situation assessments (SA). The operators used feature matching and story building to make all SA decisions. The operators invoked recognitional strategies to generate 95% of the course of action (COA) options and compared multiple options in only 5% of the COA decisions. The findings reported here indicate that under conditions of time pressure and ambiguity: decision makers rarely use analytical decision strategies, they usually satisfice rather than optimize, they rely heavily on diagnostic decisions, and they invoke singular rather than comparative evaluations of courses of action.