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Degree of automation in command and control decision support systems

This paper investigates the effects of integrating automation into the various stages of information processing in a military command and control scenario. Command and control (C2) is an extreme decision-making paradigm characterized by high uncertainty, high risk, and severe time pressure. We introduce a principled approach to decision support system (DSS) design that specifically addresses these issues. Our approach establishes the principles of communicating confidence in sensor estimates and consequence of actions in an intuitive, timely manner. We hypothesize that automation designed to communicate confidence and/or consequence will improve task performance over systems that neglect these concepts. Toward this end, human-subjects experiments were conducted to compare the effects of displaying confidence/consequence information in a C2 target-tracking and interdiction scenario. Four variations of a decision support interface were designed, each with a distinct “degree of automation”: (i) an instantaneous sensor measurement visualization (baseline), (ii) a confidence-based visualization, (iii) a confidence- and consequence-based visualization, and (iv) a confidence- and consequence-based visualization with explicit decision recommendations. While increasing automation generally improved results, the inclusion of consequence information did not have a major effect, perhaps because the scenario was overly-simplified.