Modeling Team Performance in the Air Defense Warfare

A task centric approach to interface design entails an explicit representation, of actions – tasks – that need to be performed by the operator. The interface may represent tasks in the form of icons on a display screen that the system has determined actionable given the current tactical information and Rules of Engagement (ROE). The representation of work in terms of a task serves as a trace in the system that enables designers to track workload in addition to the task progress and flow of tasks among team members. Using Queueing Theory statistics, performance for two Air Defense Warfare Teams were analyzed. This analysis revealed that task allocation, work- flow and the internal dynamics of the two teams were very different. Interestingly, neither team allocated tasks to team members as envisioned by the system designers. Bottlenecks, unforeseen by the system designers, had been introduced by the dynamics of the team. These bottlenecks were more pronounced for one of the teams and led to quantifiable differences in the queuing statistics. In particular, substantial differences in the average life of a task and average number of outstanding tasks operators had to perform were observed