Modelling Situation Awareness Information for Naval Decision Support Design

In nowadays complex and dynamic changing military environments supporting Situation Awareness (SA) of operators is a prerequisite for situationand task-adequate decision making and action accomplishment. SA refers to information on three levels which represent relevant elements of the operator environment, element patterns describing complex mission situations, and projections of future states and dynamics of elements. A means for supporting SA of operators are adaptive knowledge-based user interfaces. For developing such interfaces information of the three different SA levels which operators need in performing their tasks have to be specified and modelled. One source from which that information can be acquired are scenarios which have to be developed in any case for system design as well as for operator training. For specifying relevant SA information a model of the problem domain has been developed which comprises the True World of scenarios, the Sensed World of detected tracks, and the Deduced World of concluded track information. To uniformly describe these different worlds an object oriented approach has been applied which is based on static and dynamic scenario and track objects which are specified mathematically. Attributes and operations of track objects constitute elements and patterns of relevant SA information to be identified. Additionally, the described mathematical model of track objects constitutes the basis for developing a software specification with the object-oriented Unified Modelling Language UML. Using a Navy Anti-Air Warfare scenario as an example the application of the developed modelling approach is demonstrated in detail.