Toward Developing Situation Awareness Evaluation Strategies for Command and Control Environments

Abstract

This paper describes an initial effort to measure Situation Awareness (SA) in the context of logistics command and control (C2). Logistics Control and Information Support (LOCIS) is a prototype decision aid intended to allow a maintenance supervisor to perform his/her job more quickly without loss of SA. A literature review revealed that existing measures devised to assess SA in the context of aviation do not transfer well to C2 tasks. Therefore, existing measures of SA were adapted, and then piloted. Findings indicate that LOCIS provides support for building SA in the context of two specific tasks key to the maintenance supervisor job: preparing for the Daily Aircraft Maintenance Morning meeting and planning for a deployment. This small-scale study represents a first step toward assessing SA in C2 tasks.