Situation Awareness (SA) is a theoretical construct concerning the knowledge of the situation in relation to technology design and influence on operator performance. Regardless of the controversies of its theoretical basis, it seems practical to assess operator SA as knowledge of the situation, which is intuitively necessary to control technology appropriately. 

In conducting a previous study [SRO 04], we found that existing SA models, as a natural outcome of generalization, do not provide the necessary foundation to formulate operational definitions and to derive measurements for the process control domain. These theoretical models, while useful to communicate high level findings, often exclude complexities and details pertinent to the domain and tasks performed by operators, but include a host of cognitive aspects associated with tasks from unrelated domains. In effect, operational definitions based on such models cannot provide any precise descriptions of the cognitive processes engaged by process control operators in acquiring SA.

This project aims to develop a domain-specific SA model for the process control domain that provides the necessary foundation to formulate meaningful operational definitions and derive indicative measurements.