Investigating human/system interfaces and interactions in a "lights-out" operational environment

The concepts of "lights-out" operations and human/computer interfaces and interactions (HCI) are not incongruous ideas. The concept of automated operations without the immediate presence of people raises interesting and complicated issues associated with human/computer interfaces and interactions when, in fact, people are integrated back into and must interact with the automated operational environment for some complicated problem-solving exercise. The cognitive research proposed to investigate these issues focuses first on the representation question, that is, how best to represent system status to the remotely-located analyst. These concepts are being tested in the lights-out ground operations system (LOGOS), an experimental testbed at NASA-Goddard. Thus, the context of our paper is a mission operations environment that has been automated through the use of agent technology.