Common Situational Awareness Research Articles

Communication System Architecture for Air Traffic Management and Weather Information Dissemination

The authors present the communication system architecture for air traffic management and weather information dissemination as viewed within the context of the overall National Airspace System (NAS) and the services it provides. This presents the architecture in the 2015 time frame when the final phases of transition take place from analog voice to digital data exchange of common data via integrated networks. The results of this transition are an integrated collection of systems and procedures that efficiently use the capacity of the NAS while balancing access to all user classes and maintaining the highest levels of safety. Efficient collaboration among users is built on a foundation of common data. This information base provides common situational awareness to all participants. All users are accommodated and will receive benefits commensurate with equipage level. This architecture development provides a technical framework for decision-making, research, and analysis of communication technologies

Clinical Information Use by Medical and Nursing Staff in the ICU: Outcomes of a Coded Tables Analysis

The long-term, intensive nature of patient admission to an Intensive Care Unit necessitates passing responsibilities from one medical and nursing staff member to another. An ideal outcome of this process is a common team situation awareness of the patient's condition. However, medical and nursing staff have different training and practice regimes, which raise questions about the nature of the situation awareness needed by the two groups. Statistical and an exploratory data analysis techniques were used to explore the information content of video-cued recall interviews in order to identify differences in information use. Doctors were found to attend to future patient projections over a broader range of physiological functions than nurses, reflecting a strategic orientation, whereas, nurses attended to sensed information over shorter timeframes than doctors, reflecting a tactical orientation. When not aligned these orientations may lead to breakdown in coordination and discontinuities in patient care.

Evaluating an Information Display for Clinical Decision Making in the Intensive Care Unit

This paper reports the evaluation of a Recursive-Diagnostic Framework (RDF) based paper prototype for a clinical information system in the intensive care unit (ICU). Based on an observation of the reliability and validity of RDF concepts when applied to real-world data, it was hypothesised that an RDF-based information design might facilitate more efficient information processing by ICU medical and nursing staff. Eight nurses and four senior medical consultants participated in an experimental protocol that involved completing ICU tasks with patient data using conventional vs RDF designs. Nurses were asked to complete change detection tasks, whereas doctors completed diagnostic tasks. The results of the experiments show that nurses were able to identify significantly more changed parameters over broader time spans using the new design compared to the old. Doctors show greater levels of diagnostic agreement using the new design. These findings support the view that the structure of information in the new design better supports ICU roles and common situation awareness.

Enhancements to the FAA Ground-Delay Program Under Collaborative Decision Making

When airport arrival capacity is reduced, it may not meet the demand placed by arriving aircraft. In these cases, the FAA enacts a ground-delay program (GDP) to delay flights before they depart from their origin airports, keeping traffic at an acceptable level for the affected arrival airport. However, air-traffic managers sometimes lacked current data and a common situational awareness when running a GDP. Working with the FAA and the airline community, Metron, Inc. and Volpe National Transportation Systems Center improved the process by using real-time data exchange between all users, new algorithms to assign flight-arrival slots, and new software at FAA facilities and airlines. This paper reflects the views and opinions of the authors and does not necessarily reflect that of the FAA.