Synergetic Model of Situational Awareness of a Human Operator in Ergatic Control Systems of Mobile Objects

Abstract

At present, researches of ergatic control systems for moving objects, in which an important role is assigned to the human  operator, are of particular relevance. The effectiveness of the functioning of such systems largely depends on the state of the human operator and, first of all, on his situational  awareness. Insufficient  or inadequate  awareness of the operator about the situation in such systems is one of the main  factors of accidents  associated with human  error. Therefore, the task of creating models of professional activity of a human  operator, including  models of his situational  awareness,  is urgent. It is shown that situational awareness is based on mental models of a human  operator. Their adequacy  depends on many subjective characteristics (factors) peculiar to a person, for example, his intelligence, mental state, accumulated  experience. Mathematical formalization  will reduce the subjective component in the formation of situational awareness. It is noted that important properties of situational awareness of the human  operator are associativity and ranking of information  depending on the context of the problem being solved. Therefore, situational awareness provides perception of the current situation and allows you to make  the right decisions in response to certain threats. The levels of implementation of situational  awareness in a human  operator are given. A feature of the first level is the need for joint processing of a large amount  of heterogeneous information  in order to identify  significant facts and critical information  about external  objects. The  task of the second level is to form a holistic picture of the situation, which is based on existing knowledge and previous experience. The third, highest level of understanding  of the situation is based on the ability of a person to predict the actions of moving objects and the consequences of these actions. It is proposed to form a model of situational awareness  based on Haken’s  synergetic approach.  Like  most other intelligent systems, the synergetic Haken’s  model  includes learning and recognition processes. A description of the process of recognizing a critical situation using a trained synergetic model is given. The  value of the attention  parameter, which characterizes  the importance of a specific characteristic of the state of the controlled object in the ergatic system, is noted. The associative properties of the synergetic model and its ability to rank the initial information  in the process of threat analysis during helicopter control are investigated.