With the increased interest in multi-user systems with distributed decision making tasks, such as network centric warfare and free-flight air traffic control, the concept of shared situation awareness (SSA) has become more important.
SSA relates to the awareness that different operators have of the system state and the information needs of their team-mates, in order to coordinate their actions effectively. However, there are many different definitions of SSA in the literature and no generally agreed methodology for measuring it. Investigation to date has primarily been conducted through human-in-the-loop (HIL) experiments, which typically are costly and return only subjective results.
Agent based modelling has been proposed as a partial solution, using software agents to take the place of humans in experiments. This paper describes the application of agent based modelling to a multi-user system: namely, the SCUDhunt game. The paper examines different ways of sharing information between operators, and their effect on team performance in cases with less than perfect information. Agent based modelling enables performance to be tested on a wide range of scenarios quickly and repeatedly and yields insights that would be difficult to achieve through HIL experiments alone.
[…] [⇒ Situational Awareness]
The term Situation Awareness (SA) is used when referring to how well a system’s operator understands the state of the system at any time and how well this contributes to their decision making [12]. There is now substantial literature built up around this area(see Section 2 for a brief outline). For multi-user systems, Shared Situation Awareness (SSA) refers roughly to how well operators understand the state of other operators, and in particular how the individual’s actions affect their team-mates’ actions, so that operators can work together to achieve team goals [21, 24]. However, there are many different definitions of SSA in the literature and few methodologies for how to measure and analyse it beyond Human-In-the-Loop (HIL) experiments.
This paper investigates the potential for use of agent based modelling and simulation to complement research into HIL experiments, in order to investigate issues of SSA. We use a multiplayer game called SCUDhunt [23] to investigate the effect on SSA of different ways of sharing information, in a range of different scenarios. We demonstrate that an agent based model can give insights into SSA that would be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain through HIL experiments alone.
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 reviews the literature on SA and SSA. Section 3 describes the SCUDhunt game, the model of agent behaviour and outlines the aspects of SSA that will be investigated. Section 4 describes the design of the experiment and the measures that were collected, and Section 5 presents some of the results and discusses their relevance to SSA. The paper finishes with conclusions and suggestions for future work.
~
CONNELLY, Simon, LINDSAY, Peter and GALLAGHER, Marcus, 2007. An agent based approach to examining shared situation awareness. In: 12th IEEE International Conference on Engineering Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS 2007). IEEE. 2007. p. 138–147.