Constructing and Applying Cognitive Models to Mission Management Problems in Air Anti-Submarine Warfare

The ever-increasing capabilities of computers have resulted in a new generation of man-machine systems in which the machine acts in an intelligent manner to enhance the operator's decision-making capabilities in real-time multi-tasking (RTMT) situations. In such situations, the operator's information needs constantly change as he/she must attend to several events simultaneously and often switch from one decision-making task to another. The ability of the intelligent systems to aid humans in a flexible interactive fashion depends on the capability of the machine to predict these switches and the resulting changes in the human's information needs at a given time. These systems must therefore incorporate a model of the human operator's tasks based on information about the individual tasks and the dynamic relationships between the tasks and the occurrence of outside events. This paper focuses on the construction of such a model in the context of mission management problems of airborne Tactical Coordinators (TACCOs) in anti-submarine warfare (ASW). The model is built as a Cognitive Network of Tasks (COGNET) and is based on the integration of GOMS notation and the Blackboard architecture and is now being used to develop an adaptive intelligent interface for TACCOs.