Situation awareness

Situational awareness or situation awareness (SA) is the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their future status. ...situation awareness is about the knowledge state that's achieved—either knowledge of current data elements, or inferences drawn from these data, or predictions that can be made using these inferences. In contrast, sensemaking is about the process of achieving these kinds of outcomes, the strategies, and the barriers encountered.'a distinguishable set of two or more people who interact dynamically, interdependently and adaptively toward a common and valued goal/objective/mission, who have each been assigned specific roles or functions to perform, and who have a limited life span of membership.' Situational awareness or situation awareness (SA) is the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their future status. Situation awareness has been recognized as a critical, yet often elusive, foundation for successful decision-making across a broad range of situations, including aviation, air traffic control, ship navigation, health care, emergency response, military command and control operations, and offshore oil and nuclear power plant management. Lacking or inadequate situation awareness has been identified as one of the primary factors in accidents attributed to human error. The formal definition of SA is broken down into three segments: perception of the elements in the environment, comprehension of the situation, and projection of future status. Three facets of SA have been in focus in research: SA states, SA systems, and SA processes. SA states refers to the actual awareness of the situation. SA systems refers to the distribution of SA in teams and between objects in the environment, and to the exchange of SA between system parts. SA processes refers to the updating of SA states, and what guides the moment-to-moment change of SA. Although the term itself is fairly recent, the concept has roots in the history of military theory—it is recognizable in Sun Tzu's The Art of War, for example. The term can be traced to World War I, where it was recognized as a crucial skill for crews in military aircraft. There is evidence that the term situational awareness was first employed at the Douglas Aircraft Company during human factors engineering research while developing vertical and horizontal situation displays and evaluating digital-control placement for the next generation of commercial aircraft. Research programs in flight-crew computer interaction and mental workload measurement built on the concept of awareness measurement from a series of experiments that measured contingency awareness during learning, and later extended to mental workload and fatigue. Situation awareness appears in the technical literature as early as 1983, when describing the benefits of a prototype touch-screen navigation display. During the early 1980s, integrated “vertical-situation” and “horizontal-situation” displays were being developed for commercial aircraft to replace multiple electro-mechanical instruments. Integrated situation displays combined the information from several instruments enabling more efficient access to critical flight parameters, thereby improving situational awareness and reducing pilot workload. Before being widely adopted by human factors scientists in the 1990s, the term is said to have been used by United States Air Force (USAF) fighter aircrew returning from war in Korea and Vietnam. They identified having good SA as the decisive factor in air combat engagements—the 'ace factor'. Survival in a dogfight was typically a matter of observing the opponent's current move and anticipating his next move a fraction of a second before he could observe and anticipate it himself. USAF pilots also came to equate SA with the 'observe' and 'orient' phases of the famous observe-orient-decide-act loop (OODA loop), or Boyd cycle, as described by the USAF war theorist Col. John Boyd. In combat, the winning strategy is to 'get inside' your opponent's OODA loop, not just by making one's own decisions quicker, but also by having better SA than one's opponent, and even changing the situation in ways that the opponent cannot monitor or even comprehend. Losing one's own SA, in contrast, equates to being 'out of the loop'. Clearly, SA has far reaching applications, as it is necessary for individuals and teams to function effectively in their environment. Thus, we are beginning to see SA going beyond the field of aviation to work being conducted in a wide variety of environments. Currently, SA is being studied in such diverse areas as air traffic control, nuclear power plant operation, vehicle operation, and anesthesiology. Several cognitive processes related to situation awareness are briefly described in this section. The matrix shown below attempts to illustrate the relationship among some of these concepts. Note that situation awareness and situational assessment are more commonly discussed in information fusion complex domains such as aviation and military operations and relate more to achieving immediate tactical objectives. Sensemaking and achieving understanding are more commonly found in industry and the organizational psychology literature and often relate to achieving long-term strategic objectives.