Situational awareness and human factors when designing complex systems

Abstract

The background for this paper is to prepare for the execution of a research project in systems engineering about situational awareness and human factors. The authors use a major defense company as the case for this research. The company is developing a new weapon system that allows one operator to operate multiple remote weapon systems. The systems will produce a large amount of data that the operators must use in their decision-making process. To make the right decisions, the operators need good situational awareness. The authors have examined publications about situational awareness and human factors and elaborated on the research design for the upcoming research project. Findings in the literature suggest that situational awareness consists of three levels. In all three levels, several factors affect an operator's ability to build and maintain situational awareness. The hypothesis for the upcoming research project is that the company lacks in-depth knowledge about situational awareness.