Situation awareness requirements for a critical infrastructure monitoring operator

This paper presents a set of situation awareness (SA) requirements for an operator who monitors critical infrastructure (CI). The requirements consist of pieces of information that the operator needs in order to be successful in their work. The purpose of this research was to define a common requirement base that can be used when designing a CI monitoring system or a user interface to support SA. The requirements can also be used during system or user interface evaluation, and as a guide for what aspects to emphasize when training new CI monitoring operators. To create the SA requirements, goal-directed task analysis (GDTA) was conducted. For GDTA, nine interview sessions were held during the research. For a clear understanding of a CI monitoring operator´s work, all interviewees were subject matter experts (SMEs) and had extensive experience in CI monitoring. Before the interviews, a day-long observation session was conducted to gather initial input for the GDTA goal hierarchy and the SA requirements. GDTA identified three goals an operator must achieve in order to be successful in their work, and they were used to define the final SA requirements. As a result, a hierarchy diagram was constructed that includes three goals: monitoring, analysis and internal communication, and external communication. The SA requirements for a CI monitoring operator include information regarding ongoing incidents in the environment and the state of systems and services in the operator´s organization.