Enhancing situation awareness via automated situation assessment

The human cognitive process of situation awareness is limited to the amount of data and the level of complexity between the data elements. Situation assessment, encompassing automated threat and impact assessment, shall assist human analysts by estimating the critical activities and objects in an emerging situation. The existing work on situation assessment, while serving its individual purposes, is not driven explicitly by the need to enhance situation awareness. This article provides a summary of various related work, ranging from visualization to algorithmic threat projection, and describes a humancentered framework that associates situation assessment processes and models with requirements needed to enhance situation awareness.