C4i - detailed Information on research and downloadable reports

Questions on this area of HFI DTC work can be addressed to Professor Neville Stanton.

Common HMI for UxVs: Design Philosophy and Design Concept

Unmanned Vehicles (UxVs) are dependent on inputs from human operators for much of their functioning. Currently a single platform-payload system tends to require several operators, but as the on-board and base technology becomes more sophisticated it is expected that a single operator will be able to manage one or even multiple unmanned systems. However, while there is much investment in developing the enabling technologies such as autonomy and interoperability, little is being invested in developing the HMI used by operators. Efforts have been made to standardise the control of UAV Control Systems (UCS) – captured in STANAG 4586 (Standard Interface of UAV Control System for NATO UAV Interoperability). However, the HMIs of existing systems have tended to be ad-hoc designs with little concern for usability or standardisation.

The potential benefits of a common HMI for UxVs are classically reported as being reduced training costs through integration of operator training, easier transfer of operators from one system to another, better handover of control between operators, reduced logistics burden, and cost savings from avoiding unnecessary duplication. During the course of this work it has been found that there are limitations to achieving these benefits. As a consequence, this report includes guidance on how best to accrue the benefits.

Common HMI for UxVs: Design Philosophy and Design Concept

Observation and modelling of C4i systems

The HFI DTC has observed and modelled C4i systems in operation with the Royal Navy, Air Force, Emergency Services, Rail Transport industry and the Energy Distribution Industry. Use the links below to access summaries of the work and where appropriate download the final reports.

C4i Experimentation and Brunel University Command Wall

The reports below describe experiments carried out by the HFI DTC using the Brunel University Command Wall.

Generalising from Novices to Experts in Military Studies This report completes the above suite of papers delivered during 2006. These are concerned with design issues as they related to so-called ‘Command Wall systems’. This report is about whether the results gained from novices in previous studies can be generalised to an expert (i.e. military) population.

Distributed Teamwork

Reports and downloads

Developing Guidelines for Distributed Teamwork: Review of the Literature and the HFI DTC’s Distributed Teamwork Studies Distributed teams are increasingly being employed within complex systems and rapid technological advances are affecting the ways in which they work and can potentially work. Despite this, guidance on how distributed teams should work, how they should be organised and trained, what communications technology they should use and how support systems should be designed is not readily available. This report presents, based on a review of the relevant literature and also a series of naturalistic case studies undertaken previously by the HFI DTC, a series of initial guidelines on how teams, systems, technology and procedures should be designed and organised in order to enhance distributed team working performance.

Realising CWA Designs within the Network Paradigm The motivation for this work lies in providing a form of early Human Factors assessment that can be performed during the Concept phase of the CADMID process. CWA is formative in nature, which is to say it suggests a range of possible forms a system could take. The network paradigm typically deals with sociotechnical systems that are already extant on the basis of empirical data. By applying network analysis techniques to CWAcreated but otherwise putative sociotechnical systems, there is the prospect of carrying out a deeper investigation of the qualities that system has well in advance of any instantiation of it.

Emerging Technologies for Distributed Teamwork To determine how emerging technologies could be used to support distributed teamwork, the components thought to make up distributed teamwork were modelled using Cognitive Work Analysis to produce a generic Abstraction Hierarchy (AH). The Command and Control (C2) Armed Forces domain was added to the AH in order to provide specific activities which could be supported by technology examples. By placing at the lowest layer of the AH both ‘physical artefacts’ (in the form of technology examples) and ‘military cognitive activities’ (relating to C2 in the Armed Forces), it was possible, via means-end links, to determine their individual and combined contribution to distributed teamwork.

Networked Enabled Capability (NEC) and Command and Control

Reports and downloads

Identifying Information Requirements for Work Aid Design Advanced technological systems, such as digitised mission support systems and knowledge wall displays, are increasingly being used to support performance in the military. Ensuring that such devices deliver the right information, at the right time, in the right format, to the right operators is of paramount importance (Endsley & Jones, 1997; Endsley, Bolte & Jones, 2003; Salmon, Stanton, Walker & Jenkins, In Press), and yet, valid, theoretically underpinned approaches for identifying the range of user information requirements within collaborative systems are scarce. Without such approaches, systems are often designed based on designer and end-user opinion, and, as a corollary, information requirements across the collaborative system are often not fully supported.

Using the Decision-Ladder to add a Formative Element to Naturalistic Decision Making Research The primary reason for the approach developed and described in this report, is in direct response to the complexity of the sociotechnical domains that typify military systems. These complicated, dynamic domains are frequently unpredictable; thus, there is perceived benefit in an approach that models the decision making activity in terms of how actors can proceed through the process rather than how they actually do or should.

Decision making training for synthetic environments: Using the decision ladder to extract specifications for synthetic environments design and evaluation This report, addressing ‘decision making training for synthetic environments’, builds heavily upon a report submitted under Work Package 4.6.1, ‘Using the decision ladder to add a formative element to naturalistic decision making research’ (Jenkins et al, 2008). This previous report provides valuable background and context, introducing decision making and presenting a new approach for its consideration in complex sociotechnical systems. Whilst this report has been structured as a stand-alone publication, readers are directed to Jenkins et al (2008) for a more comprehensive description of the model underlying this approach.

Beyond NEC The concept of an ‘Edge Organization’ represents a vision of Network Enabled Capability (NEC) as a fully interconnected web of agents and actors. Real-life NEC, however, is thought to adopt a variety of different architectures. This report is about exploring exactly what NEC topologies do arise in practice, and what they mean.

Using Sociotechnical Theory to Explore the Organisational and Structural Foundations of NEC This report is about how best to exploit human adaptability in the Network Enabled Capability (NEC) era. The report covers all aspects of an exploratory study that examines the processes by which human adaptability takes place under conditions of ‘Classic Command and Control (C2)’ compared to NEC.

A Review of Sociotechnical Systems Theory: A Classic Concept for New Command and Control Paradigms This report is about the military relevance of a long standing area of research: sociotechnical systems theory. Traditional military command and control is increasingly challenged by a host of modern problems. These include environmental complexity, dynamism, new technology, and competition that is able to exploit the weaknesses of an organisational paradigm that has been dominant since the industrial revolution. The conceptual response to these challenges is a new type of command and control organisation called Network Enabled Capability (NEC), yet organisations with ‘network enabled’ characteristics have been the subject of analysis within the sociotechnical school for several decades.

Forms of Network Representation for Network Enabled Capability: Human Factors interpretation of Network Representations The representations used to define and explore Network Enabled Capability are concerned with the definition of networks involving technology (i.e., computing or communications) and the processes that these support. However, there remains a question as to whether these perspectives can be usefully employed by Human Factors, and whether Human Factors recommendations can be couched in terms that are amenable to technology-oriented representations. Addressing this relationship (between technology- and human-oriented representations of networks) allows Human Factors issues and concerns to be considered within the context of these engineering models.

An Exploratory Study into Remote and Co-Located Command Planning This report is about an experimental study into distributed teams that ran in the latter part of 2006. It is a collaboration between the Human Factors Integration Defence Technology Centre (HFI DTC) and the Ministry of Defence Directorate of Command, Control and Information Infrastructure (DEC CCII). The practical question that this report aims to address is: “How does the military commander keep involved in the planning process when they are remote from it?”

Measuring Situation Awareness during Command and Control Activity: A Comparison of Measures Study The level of Situation Awareness (SA) that systems and devices provide to individuals and teams is a critical factor that needs assessing throughout the design process. There are various methods available for assessing SA, yet there is little guidance available on which of these methods are the most valid, reliable and accurate. The purpose of this study was to compare three existing SA measures when used to measure participant SA during a command and control experiment.

Human Performance Under Two Different Command and Control Paradigms This report is about subjecting commonly held beliefs about the benefits of Network Enabled Capability (NEC) to direct empirical tests. In this case, the assumption that NEC leads to increased tempo and effectiveness is considered.

Social Network Analysis, Team Cohesion and Meaningfulness of Tasks: A Comparison Between Two Different Command and Control Paradigms This report is about subjecting commonly held beliefs about the benefits of Network Enabled Capability (NEC) to direct empirical tests from a Sociotechnical Systems perspective. It is hypothesised that NEC should not just lead to widespread changes in the type and structure of communication but that this should be mirrored in a corresponding improvement in the experience of people working within it.

From Clansman to ComBAT: HFI Principles for NEC System Design The report is about how to design networked, interoperable equipment such as that found within NEC domains. Part 1 presents the theoretical rationale for Part 2, which sets out a collection of high level design principles.

Mapping the Study of Complexity to Human Factors: An Initial Model This work comprises part of a suite of reports that deal with Sociotechnical Theory and Network Enabled Capability (NEC) system design (HFI DTC Work Package 2.17). The current report describes some of the foundational work that has been used to design an actionable model of command and control in the form of an extended NATO SAS-050 approach space.

Evaluation of existing Human Factors tools and methods

Existing Human Factors design and evaluation methods have been evaluated for their suitability for applying to the design of C4i systems. View the summary of these studies.
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Development of a tool to support analysis of C4i systems

An analytical prototyping tool called WESTT (Workload, Error, Situation awareness, Teamwork & Time) has been developed which supports the analysis of C4i systems and which allows different design options to be evaluated.
Further details and downloads

Mobile ISTAR units

Download Mobile ISTAR Datasheet

Initial models of a wearable computers have been developed as part of the work to develop mobile Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) units.
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