Situation awareness

About: Situation awareness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 7380 publications have been published within this topic receiving 108695 citations. The topic is also known as: SA & situational awareness.

Cognitive Modelling and Computational Simulation of Drivers Mental Activities

Abstract: Several car driver models are available in the literature. From an historical point of view, it is possible to identify three main phases, for the last 40 years, in this research area. The works of (1970), centred on task analysis, are typically representative of the studies carried out during the 1970s. The authors proposed a taxonomy of the main driving tasks (e.g. accelerating, steering, overtaking, lane changing) organised in nine categories (e.g. basic control tasks, tasks related to traffic condition). This work closely parallels the research of Allen et al. (1970), who divided the driving task in three levels: the microperformance, the situational performance and the macroperformance. These levels differ both according to their time scale and with regard to the kind of cognitive activity required. At the microperformance level, most of the actions are automated skills. Steering and speed control are the main subtasks. Feedback loops, concerning driving action implemented at this level, are very short (on the order of seconds). The macroperformance concerns the trip planning and the route finding during the trip. It corresponds to slow conscious processes requiring cognitive resources. The time scale can be hours at this level. Between these two levels, situational performance corresponds to the analysis of the road environment and to the selection of relevant behaviour in the current situation and traffic conditions. Performance at this level is determined by the driver’s perception and understanding of the driving context.

Historical Development of the Air Traffic Control System

Abstract: Early attempts to provide a semblance of air traffic control were based on simple "rules of the road" resulting from the European sponsored International Convention for Air Navigation (1919). The United States formulated its first regulations relating to air traffic following the passage of the Air Commerce Act of 1926. By 1930, radio equipped airport traffic control towers were being established by some local (municipal) authorities. In 1933 instrument flying commenced, and by 1935 several airlines jointly established the first Airway Traffic Control centers to safeguard their aircraft against midair collisions. In 1936 this preliminary effort was transferred to the Federal Government, and the first-generation Air Traffic Control (ATC) System was born. This generation pioneered the development of ATC procedures, rules and regulations, the establishment of a nationwide ATC system for both civil and military air traffic, and certain new equipment and facilities. The advent of radar in the early 1950's marked the inauguration of the second-generation system, which carried on, expanded, and improved the accomplishments of the first generation, and brought into operational use radar and direct center/pilot communication capability. In the early 1960's the third generation came into being with the introduction of automation. Recognizing the need to develop a more comprehensive approach to solving the requirements of ever increasing air traffic volume, an upgraded third-generation system was postulated in 1969. The third/upgraded third generations will merge during the 1970's. From this base, the ATC System will transition to a fourth generation, which may be expected to be defined during the first half of the 1970's, with initial implementation commencing perhaps in the early 1980's.

An Exploration of Blockchain Enabled Decentralized Capability based Access Control Strategy for Space Situation Awareness

Abstract: Space situation awareness (SSA) includes tracking of active and inactive resident space objects (RSOs) and assessing the space environment through sensor data collection and processing. To enhance SSA, the dynamic data-driven applications systems (DDDAS) framework couples on-line data with off-line models to enhance system performance. Using feedback control, sensor management, and communications reliability. For information management, there is a need for identity authentication and access control to ensure the integrity of exchanged data as well as to grant authorized entities access right to data and services. Due to decentralization and heterogeneity of SSA systems, it is challenging to build an efficient centralized access control system, which could either be a performance bottleneck or the single point of failure. Inspired by the blockchain and smart contract technology, this paper introduces BlendCAC, a decentralized authentication and capability-based access control mechanism to enable effective protection for devices, services and information in SSA networks. To achieve secure identity authentication, the BlendCAC leverages the blockchain to create virtual trust zones and a robust identity-based capability token management strategy is proposed. A proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented on both resources-constrained devices and more powerful computing devices, and is tested on a private Ethereum blockchain network. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the BlendCAC scheme to offer a decentralized, scalable, lightweight and fine-grained access control solution for space system towards SSA.

Correction to “Bringing Adaptive and Immersive Interfaces to Real-World Multi-Robot Scenarios: Application to Surveillance and Intervention in Infrastructures”

Abstract: Multiple robot missions imply a series of challenges for single human operators, such as managing high workloads or maintaining a correct level of situational awareness. Conventional interfaces are not prepared to face these challenges; however, new concepts have arisen to cover this need, such as adaptive and immersive interfaces. This paper reports the design and development of an adaptive and immersive interface, as well as a complete set of experiments carried out to establish comparisons with a conventional one. The interface object of study has been developed using virtual reality to bring operators into scenarios and allow an intuitive commanding of robots. Additionally, it is able to recognize the mission’s state and show hints to the operators. The experiments were performed in both outdoor and indoor scenarios recreating an intervention after an accident in critical infrastructure. The results show the potential of adaptive and immersive interfaces in the improvement of workload, situational awareness and performance of operators in multi-robot missions.

Toward distributed declarative control of networked cyber-physical systems

Abstract: Networked Cyber-Physical Systems (NCPS) present many challenges that are not suitably addressed by existing distributed computing paradigms. They must be reactive and maintain an overall situation awareness that emerges from partial distributed knowledge. They must achieve system goals through local, asynchronous actions, using (distributed) control loops through which the environment provides essential feedback. Typical NCPS are open, dynamic, and heterogeneous in many dimensions, and often need to be rapidly instantiated and deployed for a given mission. To address these challenges, we pursue a declarative approach to provide an abstraction from the high complexity of NCPS and avoid error-prone and time-consuming low-level programming. A longer-term goal is to develop a distributed computational and logical foundation that supports a wide spectrum of system operation between autonomy and cooperation to adapt to resource constraints, in particular to limitations of computational, energy, and networking resources. Here, we present first steps toward a logical framework for NCPS that combines distributed reasoning and asynchronous control in space and time. The logical framework is based on partially ordered knowledge sharing, a distributed computing paradigm for loosely coupled systems that does not require continuous network connectivity. We illustrate our approach with a simulation prototype of our logical framework in the context of networked mobile robot teams that operate in an abstract instrumented cyber-physical space with sensors.