Situation Awareness, Mental Models and Understanding

This is an introductory discussion of links between collected situational awareness (e.g. data) and the cognitive processes required to convert this information into situation awareness that enables understanding of the actual state-of-the-art of application and promoting potential ways to satisfy the mission objectives by appropriate decision-making. The results of the discussion are merged under the name of comprehensive situation awareness (CSA) model, which is a conceptual presentation of the situation awareness (a snapshot). For using CSA in on-line control of the situation we need to create a stream of such snapshots.