Book Review

Review

Melville A. Stanton, et al, Digitising Command and Control: A Human Factors and Ergonomics Analysis of Mission Planning and Battlespace Management, Ashgate Publishing Limited, Surrey UK, 2009.

Digitising Command and Control: A Human Factors and Ergonomics Analysis of Mission Planning and Battlespace Management is one of the latest books in the Human Factors in Defence series from Ashgate Publishing. Other titles in the series include Distributed Situation Awareness: Theory, Measurement and Application to Teamwork (2009), Command and Control: The Sociotechnical Perspective (2009), Working Through Synthetic Worlds (2009), Human Factors Issues in Combat Identification, Killer Robots: Legality and Ethicality of Autonomous Weapons (2009), AirLandBattle21: Transformational Concepts for Integrating Twenty-First Century Air and Ground Forces (2009), Human Factors for Naval Marine Vehicle Design and Operation (2009), Cognitive Work Analysis: Coping with Complexity (2008), Macrocognition in Teams: Theories and Methodologies (2008), Modelling Command and Control: Event Analysis of Systemic Teamwork (2008), Performance Under Stress (2008), and Decision Making in Complex Environments (2007).

Digitising Command and Control: A Human Factors and Ergonomics Analysis of Mission Planning and Battlespace Management is co-authored by Professor Neville Stanton (Chair in Human Factors in the School of Civil Engineering and the Environment at the University of Southampton), Dr Dan Jenkins (Sociotechnic Solutions Ltd), Dr Paul Salmon (Senior Research Fellow within the Human Factors Group at the Monash University Accident Research Centre), Dr Guy Walker (Heriot-Watt University), Ms Kirsten Revell (University of Southampton), and Ms Laura Rafferty (University of Southampton).

This book aims to show how human factors and ergonomics can be used to support system analysis and development. A as part of research at the Human Factors Integration Defence Technology Centre (HFI-DTC), the authors achieve this aim through the evaluation of a digital Mission Planning and Battle-space Management (MP/BM) system with a focus on the activities at the Brigade (Bde) and the Battle Group (BG) headquarter (HQ) levels. The investigation took a multi-faceted approach, including: ‘observation of people using the traditional analogue MP/BM processes in the course of their work; cognitive work analysis of the digital MP/BM system; analysis of the tasks and goal structure required by the digital MP/BM; assessment against a usability questionnaire; analysis of the distributed situation awareness; and an environmental survey’.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the book and Chapter 2 provides an overview of the discipline of human factors and ergonomics, as well as some of the methods associated with it. Chapter 3 examines the conventional mission planning process undertaken in HQ prior to digitisation and argues that digitisation should not become an additional constraint on planning. Chapter 4 resents the results of the constraint analysis performed on the digital MP/BM, deconstructing the system into a number of levels of abstraction, an abstraction hierarchy, that were then used in interviews to establish the differences between digitised and analogue MP/BM. Chapter 5 deconstructs the activities of the digital MP/BM into a Hierarchical Task Analysis that creates a hierarchy of goals, sub-goals, and plans, which was then used to determine the ease with which operations could be performed on the digital MP/BM. Chapter 6 presents an evaluation of distributed situation awareness during planning and execution of missions using the digital MP/BM. Chapter 7 analyses the networks in digital network enabled technology, presenting the concepts behind self-synchronisation. Chapter 8 assesses the compliance of the MP/BM’s human-computer interface for compliance with EMUA 201 guidelines, and Chapter 9 reports on a usability assessment undertaken with a human-computer interface questionnaire. Chapter 10 presents assessments of the physical environment within which the MP/BM was employed.

The book concludes in Chapter 11 with a summary of the research project’s findings from the previous chapters. Additionally, the final chapter offers valuable insights and recommendations for short-term improvements in the current generation of digital MP/BM systems through: general design improvements, user-interface design improvements, hardware improvements, infrastructure improvements and support improvements.

Digitising Command and Control: A Human Factors and Ergonomics Analysis of Mission Planning and Battlespace Management is well written, well referenced, with a logical structure and a consistent style (difficult to obtain in multi-author texts). While all chapters are informative, the final chapter is particularly useful as the book achieves its aim of showing how human factors and ergonomics can be used to support system analysis and development. Given the paucity of information in that space, this book makes an important contribution to the development of digital command and control systems—it is a valuable resource.

Digitising Command and Control: A Human Factors and Ergonomics Analysis of Mission Planning and Battlespace Management can be ordered online through Ashgate Publishing Limited at: http://www.ashgate.com.