Information-centered human-machine systems analysis for tactical command and control systems modeling and development

In military operations and emergency management, operators and commanders must rely on distributed systems for safe and effective mission accomplishment. Tactical commanders and operators frequently encounter violent threats and critical demands on their cognitive capacity and reaction time. In the future, they will make decisions in situations whose operational and system characteristics are highly dynamic and nonlinear, i.e. small actions or decisions may have serious and irreversible consequences for the entire mission. Commanders and other decision makers must manage true real-time properties at all levels; individual operators, stand-alone technical systems, higher-order integrated human-machine systems and joint operations forces alike. Coping with these conditions in performance assessment, system development and operational testing is a challenge for practitioners and researchers. New results, new measurement techniques and new methodological advances facilitate a more accurate and deeper understanding, generating new and updated models. This in turn generates theoretical advances. This paper reports on research from which the results led to a breakthrough: an integrated approach to information-centered systems analysis to support future command and control systems research and development.