Maintaining Situation Awareness Over Time - A Survey on the Evolution Support of Situation Awareness Systems

Situation awareness (SAW) denotes a human's adequate interpretation of the observed environment, which is of prime relevance for human operators in control center applications (e.g., road and air traffic control). Since humans may lose their SAW due to information overload and time criticality, a series of intelligent systems have been proposed that should support human operators in gaining and maintaining SAW, whereby existing approaches focus more on the gaining aspect so far. However, a comparative evaluation of the distinct approaches has not been the focus up to now, as has been recently acknowledged. Therefore, the present work attempts at filling this gap by providing a comparative evaluation of approaches for gaining and maintaining SAW, thereby focusing on the less studied aspect of support for maintaining SAW. Thus, this survey highlights open issues and directions of further research.