This paper outlines an investigation of the impact of aircraft proximity and relationship data on the subjective mental workload of air traffic controllers. Aircraft relationships were categorized into one of 81 different categories, and these relationships were then used to predict subjective mental workload values (as reported by the participants). The results indicated that this methodology could predict subjective mental workload to an accuracy of 73%, with post-hoc analysis improving this prediction rate to 93%. These results are discussed with respect to their contribution to an understanding of the drivers of mental workload in Air Traffic Control.

Although formal planning procedures are key parts of military doctrine, they may not be well suited to highly dynamic, time-pressured environments. The authors describe an intuitive planning process developed as an alternative to the procedure used by the Canadian Forces (CF). The Intuitive Operational Planning Process (IOPP) treats planning as a highly iterative process of incremental refinement in which a single course of action is elaborated and continually evaluated for its suitability. To examine the effectiveness of the IOPP, 12 members of a reserve CF Civil Military Cooperation unit of Land Force Central Area acted as planning staffs and created plans for two simulated planning exercises. Participants employed the IOPP for one scenario and the existing CF Operational Planning Process (OPP) for another. The teams were able to successfully employ the IOPP to develop acceptable plans; however, it was not possible to determine statistically that the quality of these plans surpassed that of plans generated with the OPP because of limitations of the data set. The IOPP was judged to be very easy to use, but teams expressed less trust in it than the existing OPP. The IOPP may foster greater collaboration and commander involvement in planning than the OPP. received his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1991. He has conducted independent research on human spatial cognition, human factors of aviation security, and, over the past five years, decision making as it is related to military command and control. Bryant is a defence scientist with Defence R & D Canada-Toronto, where he is pursuing research on operational planning, inferential processes involved in situation assessment, and tactical picture compilation.Lora Bruyn Martin is a senior consultant with Humansystems® Incorporated in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Her primary areas of research are decision making and distributed team collaboration, specifically within the context of command and control in the Canadian Forces. Bruyn Martin has an M.A.Sc. in systems design engineering, with a specialty in human factors, from the University of Waterloo.

As part of ongoing research at DRDC Atlantic, Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) is being used to design enhanced capabilities for naval command and control systems. Typically, the first two steps (work domain analysis (WDA) and control task analysis (CTA)) are conducted, followed by the identification of design seeds for the development of new system concepts. To date, there has been little guidance in the literature regarding how to perform both WDA and CTA, although many practitioners have performed WDA. Fewer have performed CTA, so the interested analyst has few examples to draw from, in particular for studies in industry. The work discussed in this paper involved the use of CTA to analyse scenario-based data in order to characterize expert performance in control tasks. By understanding expert performance according to a decision ladder (DL) model, it is possible to accurately support the required level of performance in complex, dynamic, open domains. This paper presents an overview of the work and includes some examples of the analyses.

Cognitive Work Analysis is widely considered to offer a strong method for analysing domains that are not rigidly defined; where novel problem solving and unanticipated factors demand flexibility in operator performance. However, CWA is also thought to be unwieldy and time consuming. Recent work conducted on tight budgets has necessitated the development of methods to improve the coordination, integration and communication of work between CWA analysts. In particular, the use of Critical Decision Method for generating data, the use of exemplars for improving analysis validity and reliability, and the animation of outputs for communication purposes, have proven key in developing CWA-based design recommendations quickly and cost-effectively. This paper describes these efforts and provides some examples of the outputs.

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