A Common Work Space for a mutual enrichment of Human-machine Cooperation and Team-Situation Awareness

Especially in life-critical systems decision-making entails cognitive functions such as monitoring, as well as fault prevention and recovery. People involved in the control and management of such systems play two kinds of roles: positive thanks to their unique involvement and capacity to deal with the unexpected; and negative with their ability to make errors. But they are also able to detect and correct these mistakes and able to learn from them. Thus human-machine system designer can allow the humans an innovative behavior to be “aware” and to cope with unknown situations by enhancing Situation Awareness (SA). As humans are more and more involved in collective works the constructs of team-SA are important. But the literature shows a great variety and some incoherence in their definitions. That makes difficult to build a design methodology favoring human SA. In parallel, human machine cooperation models have been developed in the last two decades and validated in different dynamic application fields: Air Traffic Control, fighter aircraft cockpit, reconnaissance robot. These studies showed an increase of the problem solving capabilities and a decrease of workload when the tasks are performed by cooperative teams. In this paper we first synthesize main team-SA constructs, we then present principles of humans-machines cooperation and present a Common Work Space as a medium that allow cooperation. We propose to extend it in order to enrich team-SA constructs.