Display Formatting and Situation Awareness Model (DFSAM): An approach to aviation display

We describe a computational model, Display Formatting and Situation Awareness (DFSAM) that is designed to predict a figure of merit for an aviation display that has any of eight objectively quantifiable or definable features, such as its dimensionality (2D or 3D), clutter, or size. A set of 46 different experimental results (effect size estimates), and two meta analyses, extracted from 25 different studies conducted at University of Illinois, are analyzed and aggregated to estimate the net cost or benefit of the effect in question. These costs/benefits are referred to as amalgamated performance units (APUs). The APUs can then be combined for any particular display to predict its figure of merit, and the difference in figure of merit from any other display. The model is validated against the data from a high fidelity synthetic vision simulation, conducted with four different display formats, and was found to predict multitask flight control performance (r =0.89) and traffic awareness response time (r = 0.81) and accuracy (r = 0.96). Constraints and limits of the model are discussed. 1. Overview and Modeling Approach Various design guidelines exist for aviation display formatting. Often these exist a