Abstract
Nautical traffic management in The Netherlands is shifting from local traffic control to corridor traffic management. Current traffic management systems do not sufficiently support operators in perceptual and cognitive process to interpret and understand the large amounts of information needed for corridor traffic management. Newly developed user interface concepts aim to overcome deficiencies of current interface designs that insufficiently support situation awareness assessment. The effects of these new user interfaces, however, are insufficiently known due to the intricate relations between situation awareness, task performance, and workload. The objective of this study is to evaluate the effects of the three previously developed user interface concepts on operators’ situation awareness, task performance, and workload to gain better insights into the benefits and limitations of the user interface design concepts. The effects were tested in a simulator environment. The results show that user interface features of an integrated user interface allowed operators to apply more effective information processing, which resulted in better task performance. Features of a context-dependent adaptable user interface triggered proactive behavior of operators, which resulted in better task performance for tasks in which operators require insight into future activities of the elements in the environment.
Highlights
Nautical traffic management in the Netherlands is shifting from local traffic control to corridor traffic management (Van Doorn et al 2017b)
In our case of three user interface (UI) concepts for network management (N-ONM) tasks, we conclude that the difference between a coherent UI and an integrated UI is sufficiently significant to conclude that an integrated UI better supports operators’ situation awareness (SA) and task performance
Consolidating the results of this study reveals that the differences in effects of the coherent UI compared to the integrated UI and context-dependent adaptable UI is most likely due to a difference in information processing strategy applied by the operators
Summary
Nautical traffic management in the Netherlands is shifting from local traffic control to corridor traffic management (Van Doorn et al 2017b). Corridor traffic management operators, called nautical operational network management (N-ONM) operators, remotely manage a traffic corridor, such as the main route and alternative routes, between Port of Rotterdam and Germany. They need to gain and maintain situation awareness (SA) based on large amounts of information about the corridor. We designed and developed three user interface (UI) concepts to overcome deficiencies of current traffic management systems to increase operators’ SA and to improve operators’ task performance (Van Doorn et al 2017a). The context-dependent adaptable user interface, includes all features of the other two concepts and as such is the most elaborated UI of the three. This UI concept is more difficult and expensive to develop and maintain compared to the other two, the assumption in our previous study was that this user interface
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