A direct perception interface (DPI) integrates information into a unified animated diagram that supports fault diagnosis more strongly than conventional displays. Building on our earlier work on a DPI for nuclear thermal hydraulics, this project will lead to a complete suite of DPI displays for an entire nuclear plant, from nucleonics to power generation. It will also take into account the need for teams of operators to extract different types of information from a DPI.

Intelligent tutoring systems traditionally have provided context-sensitive support for individual students. This project examines the functional requirements for intelligent computer systems that provide support for cooperative teams of students who interact both synchronously and asynchronously.

Activity management and allocation is the foundation for coordination theory. This project addresses issues in representation and reasoning of activities carried out in the supervisory control of complex dynamic systems and how to create inspectable hierarchical visualization of activity useful for human supervisory control.

This project examines distributed supervisory control situations where a team of human operators manages multiple concurrent activities in the control of a complex dynamic system to identify critical coordination needs and develop and evaluate prototype knowledge-based support systems. Analysis of existing work practices of flight operations teams at NASA GSFC has led to the development of a modeling framework that is extended to account for activity constraints and resources and provides the basis for the development of various levels of cooperative support.

This project aims to define, develop, and evaluate a prototype intelligent command and control (ICC) system for TPOCC satellite ground control operations. Intelligent support for human operators and advanced automation for all facets of routine ground control activities are being defined with respect to task analyses of current TPOCC operator activities. Major emerging functional requirements for the ICC are activity management, intelligent monitoring, and information management and knowledge capture. As the project progresses, the concept and design of an ICC will evolve to exploit emerging technologies in human-computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work, and artificial intelligence.

The objective of this project is to support the sustainable management of civil infrastructure via (1) a principled methodology for the study of work practices, problem solving, coordination, and use of technology in an organization, (2) the integration and further development of existing information technology to support team decision making and information sharing, and (3) the application of the methodology and information technology to the civil infrastructure system at Fort Gordon, Georgia.

Current research questions about human behavior in complex work environments (industrial processes, vehicles, operational environments) require intensive observation and field recording in order to be answered. These recordings then need to be analyzed. There are many possible analysis methods in the behavioral and social sciences, and ``exploratory sequential data analysis'' is a catch-all term for them. However, there are very few guidelines for choosing between these methods. This research program represents an effort to develop such guidelines for exploratory sequential data analysis by finding the most appropriate matches between research needs, the nature of the data, and theoretical traditions.

The human role in complex systems (industrial processes, vehicles, operational environments) is difficult to analyze and design for. Researchers often analyze video or audio recordings of human operator activity, but an integrated conceptual or methodological foundation for this is lacking. No software tools exist to support such a foundation. SHAPA and MacSHAPA are software tools that represent the development of a completely new class of software for handling such data, introducing querying capabilities on time-stamped data records, enriching the information that can be extracted from video or audio recordings. They have been applied to aviation research on crew communication and workload.

Recent important advances in the automation of manufacturing systems have caused a trend toward greater system complexity and less direct manual human control. Human supervisors typically take direct manual action only under exceptional circumstances. This project looks at what the human role should be for FMS and CIM planning and scheduling. Our goal is to identify various objective dimensions of the scheduling task and to determine how the human internally represents them. This will indicate what information the human needs in order to successfully supervise an FMS, when the person needs it, and how it can best be displayed.

When maintaining and troubleshooting engineered systems of various kinds, human technicians often find that they have to reason about multiple interacting events, or faults, rather than single ones. It would seem that multiple faults are more difficult to deal with than single faults. This research examines when and how often this is true, using simulated electronic networks. It transpires that whether a multiple fault is more difficult than a single fault depends upon the nature of the multiple fault itself, the strategy the human uses to narrow down the cause of the fault, and qualitative aspects of the human's prior experience with the system in question.