| Document
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Author Aaron P. J. Roberts, Neville Stanton & Kiome Pope |
| Abstract The Command Team Experimental Testbed (ComTET) is a program of work tasked with making evidence based recommendations for future submarine control room design. Previous work from the program described information flow between a submarine command team when completing a Return To Periscope Depth (RTPD) operation. A number of bottlenecks were revealed with regard to information exchange, and particular operators were required to act as information brokers. The current pilot study aims to build on such work by examining the temporal implications of operator overload and information bottlenecks. The work was conducted in a submarine control room simulator, built specifically for research purposes. A non-commercial version of Dangerous Waters was used as the simulation engine. The creation of networked workstations allowed a team of nine operators to perform tasks completed by submarine command teams during a RTPD operation. A frequency count of information attainment (i.e. task completion) and transition of information between operators was completed. The time taken for information to transit through all stages of the tactical picture development was also recorded. The volume of information reduced in a linear fashion as it was passed between multiple operators in the command team. The time taken for information to pass between operators was greater in higher demand scenarios. The reduction in information exchange may be a product of the quality checking process. However, it may also reflect limitations in information exchange due to bottlenecks in the command team. It is recommended that the current pilot study be built upon; recruiting more teams across different operation types. This would afford statistical comparisons of information transition times during different levels of demand and different operations. This could provide valuable insight into where optimisation of information transition might best be targeted in future submarine platforms. |
