A System Theoretical Approach to Situation Awareness, A Holistic View of Purposeful Elements

This paper executes a comparison of the theories by Ackoff and Bedny & Meister for situation awareness (SA). The comparison gives a conceptual design for the common part of SA, a design that involves concepts like conscious and unconscious processes, gnostic activity, active and passive memory and dynamic processes. The design captures the ideas presented by Ackoff for adoption and learning, and is intended to work with social systems as described by Ackoff. The aim of the paper is to fill the need of conceptual general designs for SA systems. As result a definition of SA is presented, the result of the comparison of theories is presented, discussed and summarized in a conceptual design