Situation awareness and automation: issues and design approaches

In complex command and control systems, there is a need for enhanced situation awareness in order to allow the operator to solve problems effectively and to make decisions correctly. Achieving situation awareness is a most challenging design goal. Automation is implemented in a variety of systems with the primary objective to provide a better situation awareness by reducing excessive workload and by improving decision performance. A large number of problems have been reported, especially in the avionics area, where automation can be directly attributed to the opposite: a lower level of operator awareness, often leading to flight- and safety-critical situations. This paper proposes the design of an operator assistant with a flexible concept of automation. Flexible automation should allow the operator to adapt to a wide range of different operational and workload environments, to accommodate a variety of skill levels, and to obtain the required transparency into the automated process