Importance Of Situation Awareness Research Articles

Future of maritime autonomy: cybersecurity, trust and mariner's situational awareness

As technology evolves, the level of automation in the maritime industry also grows. Given the extensive benefits they offer, the industry will continue to develop its digital capabilities in order to improve. One key example of this is the industry currently striving for fully autonomous vessels. Current crew-based maritime operations on board rely on a mixture of automated simplistic processes, human decision-making, and human interventions. The future autonomy suggests the removal of the mariner physically on board. The remote nature of these operations will subject mariners and vessels to new operational risks, such as a potential reduction in Situational Awareness (SA) and/or cyber threats. In this research, authors engaged with navigators with a range of traditional operational experiences to extend previous discussions conducted with cadets on the importance of SA in maritime operations, and the potential challenges facing this when engaging in remote operations. This was done using tabletops, questionnaires and full bridge simulator exercises. Through this engagement, authors found that future navigators will need training to be equipped with new skills to interact with digital systems during different modes of human operation (such as remote monitoring, supervision and intervention) to overcome perceived challenges including cyber incident management.

Controlled Mode Distinguishability for Cybersecurity

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are a class of systems integrating cyber and physical components, and their security issues have gained a lot of attention in recent years. CPSs are modeled as hybrid systems in this letter since the logical and physical behaviors of CPS can be mapped to the discrete-state and continuous-state dynamics of the hybrid system, respectively. Motivated by the importance of situation awareness in an adversarial environment, we consider the mode distinguishability problem for a class of hybrid systems that can describe compromised CPSs. It is found that even though some modes of the hybrid system may not be distinguishable without knowing the attack inputs, the modes could be controlled distinguishable, which means their behaviors can be differentiated under certain control inputs. In this letter, the characterization of controlled distinguishability is studied, and the problem of finding control inputs for mode identification is proposed.

Situational Awareness – Key Safety Factor For The Officer Of The Watch

One of the main causes of many maritime accidents are errors caused by the human element. Analysis of many maritime accidents at sea shows that situational awareness is one of the most important safety factors. The purpose and objective of this paper is to define the concept, importance and application of situational awareness throughout history until today. It also aims to highlight the high level of situational awareness as an important safety factor possessed by the Officer of the Watch and the overall importance of the same in the maritime domain. It is important to define the role of International Maritime Organization and the World Health Organization in relation to seafarer regulations and situational awareness. To identify the prevalence of low situational awareness as a root cause of accidents through the analysis of statistical data. To demonstrate the consequences of low situational awareness among ship’s crew through examples of tragic maritime accidents, along with identifying human and organizational factors that significantly reduce situational awareness. By defining the role and application of maritime training and modern technological solutions in the efforts to prevent maritime accidents and improve the situational awareness of ship officers. The questionnaire was conducted with the aim of collecting data on the importance of situational awareness from the experienced mariners as a target group. The questionnaire also aimed to obtain more detailed information about the effectiveness offered by modern technological solutions to improve situational awareness. Based on the collected information, arguments and assertions about situational awareness as an important safety factor for the Officer of the Watch, safety recommendations are presented.

The Effect of Studying Flight Training Materials utilizing Encoding Techniques on Situational Awareness Capabilities of Students in PPL Training

The pilot’s aeronautical decision-making during the flying greatly affects flight safety, and the importance of situational awareness has been greatly emphasized as a prerequisite for making the right decision. This is the reason why more research and interests are needed to help students entering the pilot training program develop excellent situational awareness from the initial stage of training. Situational awareness is closely related to long-term memory activities in human information processing, and pedagogy and cognitive psychology have emphasized the encoding techniques as an effective long-term memory method. This study was conducted to confirm whether pilot students’ using the encoding techniques to learn flight education materials in the early stage of their training at domestic universities has a positive effect on improving their situational awareness.

Situation Awareness Under Task Complexity

Performing tasks under task complexity (TC), for example, during the management of a crisis, can be challenging. One relevant research stream has so far dealt with modelling task complexity while another research stream has established the importance of situation awareness (SA) during crisis management. This study takes into consideration these two research streams and builds a model on how SA is achieved under task complexity. The research shows that information of high information quality (IQ) reduces the level of task complexity, and influences—as well as is influenced by—situation awareness. The practice of collecting and disseminating relevant and timely information as a critical resource in improving SA should be carried out continuously. This continuous process can be improved by using information technologies as automating tools. Moreover, the study shows how shared mental models can improve SA under task complexity. A case study approach, based on qualitative data focusing on theory building, is applied. Unit of analysis is a Norwegian hospital.

Thinking Ahead of the Tractor: Driver Safety and Situation Awareness

ABSTRACTObjective: Situation awareness has been identified as a key skill in maintaining safety in high-risk, dynamic industries. However, there is a lack of research evaluating situation awareness requirements and error types in agricultural operators. The aim of this study was to explore situation awareness among farmers in the United Kingdom (UK) when operating heavy agricultural machinery.Method: The study used an online qualitative survey to collect data in three main areas: situation awareness requirements, factors impacting situation awareness, and the safety context for UK farmers. A total of 57 farmers completed the survey, responding to seven open-ended questions. Data were analyzed using directed content analysis.Results: The results indicate the importance of situation awareness for safe and efficient work practice in farming. Situation awareness requirements span the machinery system, including awareness of internal cab systems and the status of implements attached to the external machine. Farmers needed to map and monitor the surrounding conditions in addition to considering personal requirements. Data also indicated the impact of a range of factors, including system-based elements such as blind spots, individual factors such as level of fatigue, and issues related to a lack of knowledge and failure to think ahead on the maintenance of situation awareness.Conclusion: This research highlights the situation awareness requirements for operating agricultural machinery in complex and dynamic environments. By taking a human factors approach, utilizing design and practical interventions, it may be possible to both support and enhance farmer situation awareness and, therefore, reduce errors and adverse incidents.

Modern Learning and Training Tools which can be Properly Adapted and Designed to Reinforce Specialized Courses on Effective Crisis Management

Abstract This paper highlights the effectiveness of several modern training tools that could be applied within the context of training organizations, aiming towards the introduction of theoretical and practical fields, like the assessment of critical risks, the impact of time pressure and the importance of situational awareness, into the contents of a training course. The first part deals with present training tendencies and tools like distance and technology-based learning, while it is highlighted that knowledge management has gone through a deep and wide re-orientation. Quality assurance issues regarding education are also of great significance. The second part then studies the psychology of serving in combat or irregular crisis situations. It is about the particularities that compose the military, business or civil protection reality, resulting in new approaches of training courses that pursue excellent performance, particularly in dynamic and changing with high-velocity environments. Concepts like shared-ness of information, maturity in leadership decision making and cognitive task analysis can all determine a new domain of acceptable measures for crisis management training at professional level. The scope ranges from a routine organizational context to rapid response in a larger-scale emergency under pressure, requiring respective training adjustments.

Examining the Relationship between Construction Workers’ Visual Attention and Situation Awareness under Fall and Tripping Hazard Conditions: Using Mobile Eye Tracking

The risk of major occupational accidents involving tripping hazards is commonly underestimated with a large number of studies having been conducted to better understand variables that affect situation awareness: the ability to detect, perceive, and comprehend constantly evolving surroundings. An important property that affects situation awareness is the limited capacity of the attentional system. To maintain situation awareness while exposed to tripping hazards, a worker needs to obtain feedforward information about hazards, detect immediate tripping hazards, and visually scan surroundings for any potential environmental hazards. Despite the importance of situation awareness, its relationship with attention remains unknown in the construction industry. To fill this theoretical knowledge gap, this study examines differences in attentional allocation between workers with low and high situation awareness levels while exposed to tripping hazards in a real construction site. Participants were exposed to tripping hazards on a real jobsite while walking along a path in the presence of other workers. Situation awareness was measured using the situation awareness rating technique, and subjects’ eye movements were tracked as direct measures of attention via a wearable mobile eye tracker. Investigating the attentional distribution of subjects by examining fixation-count heat maps and scan paths revealed that as workers with higher situation awareness walked, they periodically looked down and scanned ahead to remain fully aware of the environment and its associated hazards. Furthermore, this study quantitatively compared the differences between the eye-tracking metrics of worker with different situation awareness levels (low versus high) using permutation simulation. The results of the statistical analysis indicate that subjects did not allocate their attention equally to all hazardous areas of interest, and these differences in attentional distribution were modulated by the workers’ level of situation awareness. This study advances theory by presenting one of the first attempts to use mobile eye-tracking technology to examine the role of cognitive processes (i.e., attention) in human error (i.e., failure to identify a hazard) and occupational accidents.

Situation Awareness Offshore: Relevant Influencing Factors and Risks

Offshore operations are an inherently hazardous activities that can result in catastrophic outcomes. The amalgamation of different hazards, constraints, and demands on offshore platforms can presents a substantial threat to the performance, productivity, and safety of workers. For most industrial accidents, there is a causal chain between human errors and organizational conditions. An investigation into the Macondo incident identified failures of situation awareness (SA) and risk perception as root causes of the disaster. Improving worker SA has become an important objective for the Oil and Gas industry. SA is a distinct, safety critical component for workers operating in complex, high-risk, and interactive work environments. Possession and maintenance of good quality SA is important for personnel whose work can be hazardous, complex, and pressured by time constraints. The drilling environment can change suddenly and for a drill crew, with an improper decision or inattention, the end result can be loss of life, severe injury, and cost millions of dollars in production loss. Offshore workers need to acquire and integrate information under operational conditions while contending with competing sources of information for their attention. SA can serve as a predictor of performance and has been particularly important where technical and situational complexity impacts the decision making efforts of the driller. A scoping literature review was conducted in order to identify how the influencing factors of elements of human factors on personnel and environmental safety, operational costs, and loss of time. Numerous databases were searched (e.g., EBSCOhost, Medline, PsychInfo, Science Direct) in combination other databases search using key terms: human factors or ergonomics and offshore with all of the following: drilling, production, fatigue, situation awareness, cognitive, oil and gas, as well as a search for human factors offshore and ergonomics offshore and human error offshore. Finally, our primary studies search was supplemented with a search of papers and abstracts within conferences. The fields of interest included stress, fatigue, interface design, human machine interaction, automation, safety culture and safety climate, risk perception and awareness. The purpose of this research was to present a summary of the current literature on the status of the oil and gas industry with regard to the adoption and integration of Human Factors methods, principles, and processes. Specific objectives were to summarize the state of the science regarding situation awareness for offshore operations, understand the importance of situation awareness for this environment, and determine key influencing factors that could affect drillers’ performance.

Exploring anesthesiologists' understanding of situational awareness: a qualitative study.

This study explored how anesthesiologists understand situational awareness (SA) and how they think SA is learned, taught, and assessed. Semi-structured interviews were performed with practicing anesthesiologists involved in teaching. This qualitative study was conducted using constructivist grounded theory techniques (i.e., line-by-line coding, memoing, and constant comparison) in a thematic analysis of interview transcripts. Group meetings were held to develop and review themes emerging from the data. Eighteen anesthesiologists were interviewed. Respondents displayed an understanding of SA using a mixture of examples from clinical experience and everyday life. Despite agreeing on the importance of SA, formal definitions of SA were lacking, and the participants did not explicate the topic of SA in either their practice or their teaching activities. Situational awareness had been learned informally through increasing independence in the clinical context, role modelling, reflection on errors, and formally through simulation. Respondents taught SA through modelling and discussing scanning behaviour, checklists, verbalization of thought processes, and debriefings. Although trainees' understanding of SA was assessed as part of the decision-making process for granting clinical independence, respondents found it difficult to give meaningful feedback on SA to their trainees. Although SA is an essential concept in anesthesiology, its use remains rather tacit, primarily due to the lack of a common operational definition of the term. Faculty development is required to help anesthesiologists teach and assess SA more explicitly in the clinical environment.

The Importance of Situational Awareness

Family-centered rounds (FCR) has become a leading model for pediatric inpatient rounding. During FCR, faculty must balance trainees' educational needs with patient care priorities. Investigators have examined trainees' views on effective teaching during FCR, but none have evaluated what family members and nurses consider to be effective teaching behaviors of attending physicians. The authors sought to explore family members' and nurses' perspectives on effective teaching behaviors during FCR. The authors conducted (2012-2013) a qualitative study of families and nurses at an academic children's hospital where FCR is the standard model for inpatient rounds. Nurses and families familiar with FCR participated in separate focus groups. The authors reviewed focus group transcripts using techniques of qualitative content analysis; they generated codes and developed categories, supported by illustrative quotations. Fifteen nurses and 13 family members participated in the focus groups. The unifying theme was that situational awareness on behalf of the attending physician is essential for FCR to be educational for all participants. The authors identified four categories of awareness-(1) cognitive factors, (2) logistics and time management, (3) physical environment, (4) emotional state-and developed a set of effective teaching strategies based on participants' comments. The findings of this study support previous work identifying effective FCR teaching strategies, but this study is the first to include the perspectives of families and nurses. The inclusion of these participants provides a framework for faculty development and training to improve the educational value of FCR.

An abnormal situation modeling method to assist operators in safety-critical systems

One of the main causes of accidents in safety-critical systems is human error. In order to reduce human errors in the process of handling abnormal situations that are highly complex and mentally taxing activities, operators need to be supported, from a cognitive perspective, in order to reduce their workload, stress, and the consequent error rate. Of the various cognitive activities, a correct understanding of the situation, i.e. situation awareness (SA), is a crucial factor in improving performance and reducing errors. Despite the importance of SA in decision-making in time- and safety-critical situations, the difficulty of SA modeling and assessment means that very few methods have as yet been developed. This study confronts this challenge, and develops an innovative abnormal situation modeling (ASM) method that exploits the capabilities of risk indicators, Bayesian networks and fuzzy logic systems. The risk indicators are used to identify abnormal situations, Bayesian networks are utilized to model them and a fuzzy logic system is developed to assess them. The ASM method can be used in the development of situation assessment decision support systems that underlie the achievement of SA. The performance of the ASM method is tested through a real case study at a chemical plant.

CoJACK: A high-level cognitive architecture with demonstrations of moderators, variability, and implications for situation awareness

Abstract We report a high-level architecture, CoJACK, that provides insights on behavior variability, situation awareness, and behavioral moderators. CoJACK combines Beliefs/Desires/Intentions (BDI) agents’ high-level knowledge representation and usability with several aspects of low-level cognitive architectures, including processing time predictions, errors, and traceability. CoJACK explores new areas for cognitive architectures, such as variability arising from moderators. It also allows aspects of situation awareness (SA) in a cognitive architecture to be explored. Its behavior and the effects of moderators on behavior are demonstrated in a simple adversarial environment. It provides lessons for other architectures including how to define, measure, and control variability due to individual and temporal aspects of cognition; the importance of SA and knowledge representations necessary to support complex SA; the potential for parameter sweeps and paths as measures of variability; and some of the complexities that will arise when aspects of moderators and SA are added to cognitive architectures.

Situation Awareness in the NextGen Air Traffic Management System

The Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) is expected to revolutionize how air traffic will be managed and significantly enhance the capacity of the National Airspace System in the United States. Because NextGen is a system that requires a high level of interaction between human operators and technology, there is a need to assess how NextGen tools and concepts of operation will impact operator situation awareness (SA). The goal of this study is to highlight the importance of SA to operator performance in complex systems. The defended view is that SA is situated, which means that operators rely in fundamental ways on interactions with external tools to maintain their understanding of a situation, minimizing internal memory storage of task relevant information. Consequently, SA metrics must be conducted in the context where operators have access to their displays and tools. The article ends with a discussion of how the situated SA approach can be used to explain the acquisition of shared SA in distributed teams and to guide applied research relating to the evaluation and development of NextGen concepts and tools.

Predicting Situation Awareness from Team Communications

Given the importance of Situation Awareness (SA) in military operations, there is a critical need for a realtime, unobtrusive tool that objectively and reliably measures warfighters' SA in both training and operations. Just as the requirement for improved access to SA measures has become vital, it is now commonplace for military team communications to be mediated by technology, hence easily captured and available for analysis. We believe that team communications can be used to derive SA measures. To address this issue, we are developing the Automated Communications Analysis of Situation Awareness (ACASA) system. ACASA combines the explanatory capacity of the SA construct with the predictive and computational power of TeamPrints, to assess team and shared SA as well as other cognitive processes. TeamPrints is a system that combines computational linguistics and machine learning techniques coupled with Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to analyze team communication. In this paper, we present the findings from an exploratory evaluation of how well TeamPrints predicts SA from the team communications arising during a military training exercise.