Assessing the Spatio-Temporal Fitness of Information Supply and Demand on Ship Bridges

BIB
Christian Denker
Besides environmental influences or technical faults, in up to 85% human error is the main reason for accidents in maritime transport. Accident report reviews reveal that insufficiencies in Situation Awareness (with 71%) are the main cause of these errors. In most cases, insufficiencies in Situation Awareness can be deduced back to two facts: either there was too less information or too much information available for the crew. In nowadays ship bridge design processes, the common bond of spatial distribution of information and temporal aspects of collaborative crew work is neglected. This thesis is addressing these aspects jointly: With the developed computer-supported method, spatio-temporal fitness of information supply and information demand can be assessed for navigational situations during design time of the ship bridge. The systemic baseline of this thesis’ method is the theory of Distributed Situation Awareness. The method consists of three high-level steps: Modelling of an integrated spatial and collaborative process model, simulative execution of work processes within the work environment, and qualitative and quantitative analysis of a simulation run, which allows detecting misfits between information supply and demand. The methodological contribution is accompanied with three conceptual contributions. These are a novel set theoretical concept for information supply and demand, a general concept of spatial geometries for transacting supplied and demanded information in space, and a concept for generalized spatio-temporal reasoning about information supply and demand relations. Combined with the method, all three concepts allow detection and measurement of misfits under consideration of interferences. The thesis gives insight into the development of the method-supporting software artifact ShiATSu. For evaluation, ShiATSu is successfully applied within three hypothesis tests, which try to proof, that 1) differences between work spaces are representable and measurable with the described method and concepts, 2) work space layout has an effect on Situation Awareness and 3) collaborative processes have an effect on Situation Awareness.
6 / 2016
phdthesis
CASCADe
Model-based Cooperative and Adaptive Ship-based Context Aware Design