Workload Model for Situation Awareness

For human system interfaces involving supervisory control with a high degree of automation, maintaining situation awareness (SA) can be an important and challenging operator task. Additionally, maintaining SA for these types of operator tasks can be a significant percentage of the operator workload to execute their mission. This paper presents a methodology for estimating the workload required for an operator to obtain and sustain SA in an operations center during a typical eight hour shift. The methodology can be used to assist in identifying operator stress points during operations, crew task allocations, and potential user interface design modifications required to increase an operator’s SA. Our method for modeling SA workload uses Wickens et al. (Hum. Factors 45:360–380, 2003 [1]), McCarley et al. (A computational model of attention/situation awareness [2]) Salience, Expectancy, Effort and Value (SEEV) model. SEEV estimates (or models) how often an operator will attend to specific data to obtain or maintain SA. This paper describes how SEEV was used to estimate SA workload and provides a sample of empirical data that was obtained to demonstrate the validity of future research on our concept.