Situational awareness through the interface: evaluating safety in safety-critical control systems

Modern safety-critical control systems are often highly interactive systems situated in dynamic environments. In complex systems such as these, the quality of the information acquired through the interface can contribute significantly to system failure and the design of the human-computer interface can have a profound effect on operator performance and system safety. This paper begins with a brief discussion on the nature of safety-critical control systems and an examination of the hazards peculiar to these systems. It concludes with a brief outline of a method of evaluating the contribution of the human-computer interface to situational awareness in a military air defence control system.