Researches On Tabletop Collaboration Mechanism For Situation Awareness

Efficient battlefield situation awareness has become the basis for access to decision-making superiority. Situation awareness tasks require command staff to work together for unanimous operation intent, so effective collaboration environment is in demand. The collaboration environment based on distributed computer system lacks the benefits of face-to-face communication, but traditional tabletop has unique advantages in supporting collaboration, therefore the study of computer supported tabletop-based collaborative situation awareness system is of great significance.In this paper, aiming to study the tabletop collaboration mechanism for situation awareness, we analysed the structure of situation awareness and extracted four sub-tasks - situation plotting, situation viewing, situation understanding and situation forecasting. The actions of those tasks were analysed and classified into operational action and communicational action according to their collaborative meaning. In addition, staff behavior was modeled by four steps: establishment of staff level, staff identification, classification of activities, and action modeling, among which activities were divided into planned tasks, cognitive tasks and creativity tasks. Touch points, touch gestures and communicational actions were modeled afterwards. On the other hand, the touch property and collaborative property of artifacts were proposed, and simultaneously the common artifacts in situation awareness system were modeled.On the basis, territory-based collaborative mechanism was proposed, which assorted the tabletop into private territory, storage territory and public territory. And then the conflicts that may be encountered in tabletop collaboration was analysed, with corresponding processing mechanism followed. Interface design rules and staff behavior rules in tabletop collaboration system were established, and the input/output management system was designed. In the end the tabletop collaboration system supporting situation awareness was designed and implemented. The performance of the system was verified through user testing experiments and the validity of collaboration rules was tested as well.