Staying aware in an evolving world — Specifying and tracking evolving situations

In control center applications, such as road and air traffic management, a human operator´s situation awareness (SAW) is of prime relevance. Operators need to assess critical situations emerging in that environment in order to undertake the appropriate (counter)actions, which becomes increasingly difficult w.r.t. today´s rapidly changing and information-rich envi-ronments. Whereas automated SAW systems assisting operators are maturing, their focus is mainly on analyzing snapshots of the current state of the environment. Support for specifying and tracking evolving situations, however, is only partly dealt with, although being highly needed, as recent studies revealed. To address this issue, we therefore propose a conceptual situation evolution model (SEM) for rule-based SAW systems. This allows on the one hand to specify potential situation evolutions at design time, thereby exploiting domain experts´ knowledge, and on the other hand serves as enabling mechanism to track actually assessed evolutions at runtime by model-based reasoning.