Dynamic 3D Visual Analytic Tools: A Method for Maintaining Situational Awareness during High Tempo Warfare or Mass Casualty Operations

摘要

Maintaining Situational Awareness (SA) is crucial to the success of high tempo operations, such as war fighting and mass casualty events (bioterrorism, natural disasters). Modern computer and software applications attempt to provide command and control manager's situational awareness via the collection, integration, interrogation and display of vast amounts of analytic data in real-time from a multitude of data sources and formats [1]. At what point does the data volume and displays begin to erode the hierarchical distributive intelligence, command and control structure of the operation taking place? In many cases, people tasked with making decisions, have insufficient experience in SA of high tempo operations and become overwhelmed easily as vast amounts of data begin to be displayed in real-time as an operation unfolds. In these situations, where data is plentiful and the relevance of the data changes rapidly, there is a chance for individuals to target fixate on those data sources they are most familiar. If these individuals fall into this type of pitfall, they will exclude other data that might be just as important to the success of the operation. To counter these issues, it is important that the computer and software applications provide a means for prompting its users to take notice of adverse conditions or trends that are critical to the operation. This paper will discuss a new method of displaying data called a Crisis View?, that monitors critical variables that are dynamically changing and allows preset thresholds to be created to prompt the user when decisions need to be made and when adverse or positive trends are detected. The new method will be explained in basic terms, with examples of its attributes and how it can be implemented.