The development of the Schema-Action-World (SAW) taxonomy for understanding decision making in aeronautical critical incidents

The perceptual cycle model (PCM) offers a process-orientated approach to understanding decision making. This approach is distributed in nature as it considers how internally held schemata and external environmental information interact to produce actions and behaviour. This an essential component of any incident reporting system, although it is often lacking. In its current form the PCM only provides a very high-level of explanation. This research utilised data from critical decision making interviews to deconstruct the three high-level categories of the PCM into a 28 item taxonomy. In doing so, we were able to provide a more detailed description of aeronautical critical decision making (ACDM) by demonstrating the relevance of different concepts in different phases of dealing with an incident. The data were used to model the ACDM process. The taxonomy can be used for gaining a comprehensive understanding of both the contextual and cognitive components of decision making, something that existing taxonomies and models often fail to do.