Addressing information display weaknesses for situational awareness

Situational awareness-monitoring, understanding, and responding to a situation-is critical for effective operations within industries such as air traffic control, aviation, disaster response, maintenance, medical, military, power systems, and transportation. The key to successful situational awareness is capturing data from a large number of distributed, heterogeneous information-sources and presenting that data in a manner that facilitates the operator's understanding of evolving events in complex and dynamic situations-including flight control, supply logistics, or battlefield management. Supporting situational awareness is a complex problem. How do we fuse a varied mixture of raw data from disparate sources into a higher order-into meaningful information that maximizes human understanding and comprehension without increasing operator stress? Current data display technologies fall short in the area of information visualization due to display-size constraints and differences in the types and sources of the data. Many display technologies approach the problem by "rolling-up" (aggregating) the data, and then allowing the operator to "drill-down"for details. The result is a time-consuming and cognitively expensive process. This paper introduces an advanced, visual display language that enables far richer data display (more data onscreen) while significantly reducing the operator's cognitive loading to process that data, thus allowing the operator to apply more cognitive abilities to decision-making and problemsolving.