Artificial Intelligence to Improve Situation Awareness for AEW&C Operators
Typ
Examensarbete för masterexamen
Program
Industrial design engineering (MPDES), MSc
Publicerad
2021
Författare
Bung Tidblom, Julius
Jansson, Elias
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
Utgivare
Sammanfattning
In the Airborne Early Warning & Control (AEW&C) system, the operator needs to be
vigilant, perform multiple tasks, communicate, and simultaneously handle different sources of
information during a mission. The operator's main objective is to receive, interpret and
distribute information and data provided by the AEW&C system to create a Recognized Air
and Sea picture (RASP). The information is then used to, for example, perform fighter jet
control and to detect anomalies. Increased capabilities of Command & Control (C2) systems
and new threats in the environment make the operators’ tasks more extensive, complicated,
and complex than ever before, which could potentially impair their Situation Awareness (SA)
and in turn their decision making. The domain is associated with high risks and potentially
devastating impacts of faulty decisions. Therefore, the importance of finding new
technologies to facilitate SA cannot be neglected. The increasing technological sophistication
regarding the rapidly growing adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers new possibilities
for creating systems facilitating SA. This motivates conducting studies to explore and analyse
the opportunities AI provides to facilitate SA for AEW&C operators, in particular critical
roles as the Fighter Controller (FC) and Surveillance Operator (SO). This study aims to
answer the questions of when and how AI could be implemented to facilitate SA.
The questions were answered using a process adapting the research through design approach.
The when-question was answered through system analysis, user studies, concept development
and evaluations and the how-question were answered by creating guidelines through literature
studies and affinity diagrams and testing the guidelines by applying them in the development
and evaluation of concepts. The system was divided into four separate subsystems where
goals, subjects, tools, and outcomes were specified. Seven categories of SA related challenges
were identified for FC and six for the SO respectively. Four concepts were created for each
role aiming to improve SA, where concepts of a talk-translation tool, a formation recognition
tool, abnormality detection tool, and timeline tool were considered the most promising for
further work. Guidelines for three phases in development of AI functions were developed:
planning, designing, and evaluating. The guidelines confirmed the utility of design through
research by being used to explore opportunities to implement AI, ideate and create concepts
and evaluate them in an AEW&C context.
Beskrivning
Ämne/nyckelord
Artificial Intelligence, Situation Awareness, AEW&C, Research through design, AI guidelines, AI in military operations, Explainable AI, Design, User studies, System analysis