A MODEL OF SUBMARINE EMERGENCY DECISIONMAKING AND DECISION AIDING
S.T. Weingaertner · Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) · 1986
The effect of decision aid upon the workload and performance of a five member decisonmaking organization is investigated by way of information theoretic modeling and analysis. A generalized submarine ship control party performing the emergency control task is modeled using the Petri Net formalism. The organization is then modified to incorporate a decision aid that provides a situation assessment to the decisonmaker with the greatest workload and decisonmaking responsibility, under the assumption that the information provided by the aid may be: (1) blocked, (2) compared with the user's own situation assessment, or (3) be used directly as the situation assessment. The decisionmakers' workload is computed using an information theoretic model of bounded rationality, and performance is measured as a function of probability of decisionmaking error weighted by error cost. The results are that a decision aid providing emergency situation assessment to the most overloaded and critical of the decisionmakers has mixed effects. Performance of the organization is improved when the aid is used, but the improvement may not be sufficient to offset decision error elsewhere in the organization. On the other hand, the workload of the user varies greatly with the manner in which the aid is used. In the extreme, the workload may be either significantly reduced or increased, while on average, it is not significantly changed by the aid.