Representing situation awareness in collaborative systems: A case study in the energy distribution domain

Abstract

The concept of Distributed Situation Awareness (DSA) is currently receiving increasing attention from the human factors community. This article investigates DSA in a collaborative real-world industrial setting by discussing the results derived from a recent naturalistic study undertaken within the UK energy distribution domain. The results describe the DSA-related information used by the networks of agents involved in the scenarios analysed, the sharing of this information between the agents, and the salience of different information elements used. Thus the structure, quality and content of each network’s DSA is discussed, along with the implications for DSA theory. The findings reinforce the notion that when viewing SA in collaborative systems, it is useful to focus on the co-ordinated behaviour of the system itself, rather than on the individual as the unit of analysis and suggest that the findings from such assessments can potentially be used to inform system, procedure and training design.