The Design of a HSMM-based Operator State Monitoring Display

This thesis presents the development of and the findings from the design and evaluation of a hidden semi-Markov model (HSMM)-based operator state monitoring display. This operator state monitoring display is designed to function as a decision support tool (DST) for the supervisor of a small team of operators (between 2 and 4 team members) that are each monitoring and controlling multiple highly autonomous heterogeneous unmanned vehicles (UVs). Such displays are important in real-time, mission-critical complex systems because both operator and vehicle state monitoring are difficult, and failure to appropriately handle emerging situations could have life or mission-critical consequences. Recent research has shown that HSMM-based models can be used to model the time-sensitive behavior of operators controlling multiple heterogeneous UVs. Because this method requires substantial knowledge in probability theory to understand, the difficulty lies in the accurate, useful display of the HSMM information to a team commander in the field. It must be assumed that the team commander generally does not have the required background in stochastic processes to understand the method and may be biased in interpreting probabilistic functions. This further increases the difficulty of the proposed method