A Closed-Loop Adaptive System for Command and Control

On Navy ships, technological developments enable crews to work more efficiently and effectively. However, in such complex, autonomous, and information-rich environments a competition for the users’ attention is going on between different information items, possibly leading to a cognitive overload. This overload originates in the limitations of human attention and constitutes a well-known and well-studied bottleneck in human information processing. The concept of adaptive automation promises a solution to the overwhelmed operator by shifting the amount of work between the human and the system in time, while maintaining a high level of situation awareness. One of the most critical challenges in developing adaptive human-machine collaboration concerns the design of a trigger mechanism. This paper discusses and evaluates a number of possible triggers for the usage in closed-loop adaptive automation from the perspective of command and control.