This paper presents a rationale for structuring a distributed human factors laboratory for future air systems. The distributed herein refers to two aspects: content and geographic. As for content, the laboratory is structured in two levels, namely, individual, and team. As for geographic, the laboratory infrastructure is distributed in three physically separate facilities, namely, Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA) and Department of Management and Engineering (IEI) from Linköping University – Sweden and the Competence Center in Manufacturing from the Aeronautics Institute of Technology (ITA) – Brazil.

Objective, easy to use, and easy to comprehend assessment methods for measuring shared understanding in teams are hard to find. This paper describes an experiment where a measure called Shared Priorities, which is based on ranking of self-generated strategic items, is assessed. Trained teams were compared to non-trained teams in a dynamic problem-solving task. The maturity of the participating teams was also assessed using a content analysis measure. The Shared Priorities measure was used alongside other well-documented measures of team awareness based on self-rating. Results show that the Shared Priorities measure correlates with task performance and could also distinguish between trained and non-trained teams. However, the Shared Priorities measure did not correlate with the other team measures (cf. CARS – Crew Awareness Rating Scale – and DATMA – Distributed Assessment of Team Mutual Awareness), suggesting that it captures a different quality of teamwork than the self-rating measures. Further, the Shared Priorities measure was found to be easily administered.

Critical infrastructures become more and more entangled and rely extensively on information technology. A deeper insight into the relationships between critical infrastructures enables the actors involved to more quickly understand the severity of information technology disruptions and to identify robust cross-functional mitigating actions. This study illustrates how and why disruptions in the payment system in Sweden could create cascading effects in other critical infrastructures with potentially severe consequences for many citizens, government institutions and companies. Data from document studies, interviews and workshops with field experts reveal seven challenges for collective cross-functional critical infrastructure resilience that need to be dealt with: 1) Shortage of food, fuel, cash, medicine; 2) Limited capacity of alternative payment solutions; 3) Cities are more vulnerable than the countryside; 4) Economically vulnerable groups in society are more severely affected; 5) Trust maintenance needs; 6) Crisis communication needs; 7) Fragmentation of responsibility for critical infrastructures across many actors. 

This paper presents a framework for reasoning about ‘timely response’, and control versus the temporal organisation of a controlling system. By three empirical examples, we show how a controlling system can be described in terms of perception points, decision points and action points. Our conclusions are that (1) temporal expectancies shape our ability to exercise control at least as much our ability to understand relations and causality, but temporality is rarely part of approaches to modelling human or system performance, (2) temporal organisation of activities shape our ability to exercise control, (3) by utilising the temporal control framework, we can describe important properties of the temporal organisation of a socio-technical system, and (4) the capacity of modelling is limited to what can be known or imagined. Therefore, models describing resilience or stability should include temporality and be based on frameworks generic enough to be applied to a wide variety of situations.

A shared awareness of other teams’ roles and tasks has been linked to successful performance in joint ventures. However, emergency management organizations responding to incidents do not always share critical information necessary for maintaining shared awareness. An instrument called Shared Priorities has previously been applied to measure aspects of shared situation awareness at level 2 and 3 in Endsley’s (1995) model. This paper reports on a shared awareness instrument focused on level 1 situation awareness and its associated level of team shared awareness. Participants in a large emergency response exercise were asked to locate and rank geographical locations based on importance for overall mission success. The results show that organizations tended to rank locations relevant for their own work higher than positions relevant to other organization’s tasks. The different organizations displayed different levels of inter-rater agreement within themselves concerning the ranking of these positions.

It has been realized that resilience as a concept involves several contradictory definitions, both for instance resilience as agile adjustment and as robust resistance to situations. Our analysis of resilience concepts and models suggest that beyond simplistic definitions, it is possible to draw up a systemic resilience model (SyRes) that maintains these opposing characteristics without contradiction. We outline six functions in a systemic model, drawing primarily on resilience engineering, and disaster response: anticipation, monitoring, response, recovery, learning, and self-monitoring. The model consists of four areas: Event-based constraints, Functional Dependencies, Adaptive Capacity and Strategy. The paper describes dependencies between constraints, functions and strategies. We argue that models such as SyRes should be useful both for envisioning new resilience methods and metrics, as well as for engineering and evaluating resilient systems.

The purpose of this work in progress paper is to report on the method development of the Shared Priorities measure to include content analysis, as a way of gaining a deeper understanding of team work in crisis/emergency response. An experiment is reported where the performance of six trained teams is compared with the performance of six non-trained teams. The experiment was performed using an emergency response microworld simulation with a forest fire scenario. Dependent measures were simulation performance, the Crew Awareness Rating Scale (CARS), and content analysis. Trained teams performed better and scored higher on measures of team behaviors.

This contribution presents a summary of activities performed in an ongoing military research project aiming at investigating the impact of navigational support on spatial awareness. Investigated tasks are e.g. indication of direction to objects beyond visual range with and without navigational support, display size, performance time, and use of GPS device in darkness. The results indicate that the ability to keep track of targets in the terrain without a technical aid is very poor, but with a GPS device targets can be indicated with relatively high precision. Precision on target indication is slightly better with a larger display, it seems possible to indicate as fast as 5 seconds with a GPS device without impairments of precision, and a GPS device can be used for target indication in darkness. Spatial ability measured by PTSOT can discriminate important aspects of spatial ability with direct relevance for navigation and target indication.