Reimagining Situation Awareness and Option Awareness for Human-Machine Teaming

We developed a Co-Awareness Analytic Framework to help ensure satisfactory performance of future teams consisting of humans and intelligent machines operating as peers. This Framework was designed to provide more precision than current tools to analyze the interactions among tasks, task environments, and the capabilities and dependencies among teams of humans and intelligent machines. A key aspect of this framework is reimagined definitions of situation awareness (SA) and option awareness (OA) so that they apply to both humans and machines, rather than defining them in purely cognitive terms that can only be applied to humans. Having appropriate SA and OA has been shown to benefit teams of humans, and there is a presumption that SA/OA will also benefit human-machine teams (HMTs). It is difficult to create requirements for, and subsequently measure, SA and OA in HMTs, however, when the current definitions for these concepts are so oriented towards humans. To address this issue, this paper provides a reconceptualization of awareness that is agnostic to team composition known as Informational Awareness definitions. It also includes a first look at the Co-Awareness Analytic Framework and a brief example of its use.