Distributed Command and Organizational Situation Awareness

Situation awareness is an essential cognitive-domain object of the command and control decision process. This paper places an organization’s SA in the context of OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) interaction between opposing teams. In addition, a hierarchical SA structure is used to organize SA generated from the physical entities in the corresponding physical domain. A rich Modal Logic-based language (SALMA) is proposed to represent and also to communicate awareness within an organization to form the Organizational Situation Awareness. An example of increase of knowledge due to Organizational SA is given. An additional example of strategic maneuver based on Organization SA is also given. The paper concludes with an assessment of technology-led innovation and the significance of measurement in situation awareness. An entity in the physical domain could have a state of awareness of the present situation. That awareness is the basis for generating actions. There is no situation awareness without the physical entity, and decision would be necessarily random without highquality situation awareness. The combination of these states of awareness form the organization situation awareness. Cognitive, information, and physical domains form a foundation for the analysis of military operations. Decision makers form situation awareness in the cognitive domain and make decisions based on knowledge, experience, and observation of the world. Physical realities can be directly observed, or more likely pass through intermediate information systems before being received by the decision makers. Eleven primitives (Sensing, Observations, Information, Knowledge, Awareness, Understanding, Sharing, Collaboration, Decisions, Actions, and Synchronization) were defined within the three domains to develop a theory on the relationship between performance and information within the military operation context. This paper focuses on awareness in the cognitive domain. Network Centric Warfare [ALBERTS03] opens up the possibility of change to the existing cognitive, information, and physical domains. Within the context of command and control, we are interested in the relationship between the organization’s structure and 1 Ph.D. student with focus on Intelligent Systems and Software Agents. 2 Associate professor of computer science with interests in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Intelligent Agents, Bioinformatics.