Assessing team workload and situational awareness in an Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) simulation exercise

Currently, one of the greatest challenges to the nation's intelligence community is the discovery of clandestine networks, typically in the context of counter-insurgency operations. MIT Lincoln Laboratory has developed an Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) "Red/Blue" exercise in which two teams compete to discover a complex network within a simulated urban environment. The teams use wide-area persistent surveillance data, as well as decision support and situational awareness tools, to trace relationships between individuals, events, and sites. Information management, analysis, and tool interaction are some of the cognitive factors that contribute to varying levels of the team's workload and situational awareness. This paper describes an initial study of the relationship between workload and situational awareness (SA) in such a setting. The paper also presents observations regarding different roles within the teams and their corresponding workload and SA.