Situational awareness and usability with an automated task management system

One approach to reducing the operators required to man future Navy surface combatants is the use of task-managed systems. These systems process incoming information and provide recommended courses of action to operators. This paper discusses the results of an experiment to investigate the feasibility of applying task management techniques to support manning reduction in the context of air defense warfare. Situational awareness (SA) and usability evaluations were conducted with a prototype design and realistic warfighting scenario. The task management application, the methods used for the determination of SA, and the investigation results are discussed, as well as results from the usability evaluation. Overall, operators may have had some difficulties in gaining higherlevel SA when using the task manager. Based on operator feedback, one of the most promising features for simplified task management support was a Gantt chart display that provided operators with a general timeline of recommended tasks as well as a history of actions taken.