# Trustworthiness of Situational Awareness: Significance and Quantification
## 6 Conclusions and Future Research Directions  
Situational awareness (SA) is crucial for successful operations in many application domains, such as humanitarian missions, surveillance, search and rescue missions, and national security. This paper provides an overview of SA from an air force perspective. This paper further contemplates security and trust issues in SA and the potential effect of these issues on the perceived SA and decision-making of commanders and operators. This paper also proposes a simple yet powerful model for quantifying the trustworthiness of an SA system. This paper then presents numerical examples that demonstrate the quantification of the trustworthiness of an SA system using our proposed model. The numerical results show that a high-trust information source that incorporates security primitives attains a trustworthiness score of 0.9933 or 99.33%, whereas a low-trust information source achieves a trustworthiness score of merely 0.00267 or 0.267% at the common operating picture. The trustworthiness of other sources with intermediate trust levels can be calculated similarly using our proposed model. These trustworthiness scores at the common operating picture provide guidance to the commander on how much trust he/she can put in the information received by a particular information source. This paper is the first of its kind to develop a model for assessing the trustworthiness of SA systems and can help stimulate further research in this area. Accurate quantification of the trustworthiness of SA systems needs further research. Automated tools need to be developed that can assist the commanders in determining the trustworthiness of different sources in the common operating picture. Furthermore, since the trustworthiness of SA sources and devices is crucial to gain the trust of a commander in the common operating picture, different security approaches can be incorporated in the design of SA sources and equipment to provide resilience against adversarial attacks. Finally, tradeoffs exist in balancing security with constraints on the performance, area, and cost of SA devices and systems. One interesting avenue of future research is to further attest our proposed model using human factor experiments [22]. The detailed human-subject experiments can be used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model in enhancing situational awareness. Such a study can be used to experimentally demonstrate that showing the trustworthiness information of all the sources in the common operating picture help enhance the situational awareness of the commander. Conceptualization, A.M.; methodology, A.M.; software, A.M.; validation, A.M.; formal analysis, A.M.; investigation, A.M. and A.A.; resources, A.M.; data curation, A.M.; writing--original draft preparation, A.M.; writing--review and editing, A.M., A.A., K.P. and J.K.; visualization, A.M.; supervision, A.M.; project administration, A.M. and A.A.; funding acquisition, A.M. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. This research was supported in part by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Information Directorate (RI), through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Summer Faculty Fellowship Program\({}^{\circledR}\), Contract Numbers FA8750-15-3-6003, FA9550-15-0001 and FA9550-20-F-0005. **Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable. **Data Availability Statement:** The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. The authors would like to acknowledge [PERSON] for his support and guidance on this research as well as for providing his valuable feedback and revision of this manuscript. **Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflicts of interest. **Disclaimer:** To the best of the authors' knowledge, the presented research in this manuscript falls under the category of fundamental/basic research and poses no public harm.