An inference method of team situation awareness based on mutual awareness
Team situation awareness (TSA) is a critical contributing factor in establishing collaborative relations among team members involved in cooperative activity. Currently, however, there is still a lack of a clearly understandable and commonly agreeable model of TSA. To resolve misunderstanding or conflict among team members or between a team and machines, our research aim is to find out the underlying mechanism of TSA that reflects team cognitive process in a way consistent with team cooperative activity, and to focus on how to achieve mutual understanding, and how to effectively incorporate human teams into a socio-technological system. In this paper, we argue that earlier models of TSA, where TSA was discussed as the intersection of situation awareness (SA) owned by individual team members, are inadequate for study of a sophisticated team reciprocal process. We suggest that it is necessary for the definition of TSA to integrate the notion of individual SA (ISA) into cooperative team activity. In particular, understanding of mutual awareness is an essential element in cooperative activity. We propose a new notion of TSA, which is reducible to mutual beliefs as well as ISA at three levels. Further, we develop an operational TSA inference method and discuss human competence and system-related factors that are required to build TSA. We then try to demonstrate how TSA is actively constructed via inferencing practices. We also develop criteria to assess appropriateness of TSA from two aspects: soundness and completeness of mutual beliefs. Comparison of evaluation results indicates that the notion of TSA proposed in this work is more suitable to depict team cooperative activity than conventional ones.
team situation awareness mutual awareness cooperative activity tsa inference team-machine interaction