Simulating behaviors of human situation awareness under high workloads

Recent, highly advanced artifact systems make it more complex and unpredict able to understand how they are used by human under a particular situation. Disastrous errors would occur when the methods of interactions deviate fro m what are expected at the design stage by the designer, who is different f rom the user. This paper presents a method by which human dynamic interacti ons with the externally provided tasks can be simulated. We concentrate on the resource-bounded human situation awareness, which is a complex phenomen on occurring at the interface between the human internal cognitive processe s and the external environment. Finally, this is applied to the analysis of the high-tech aircraft accident that occurred in Columbia in 1995, which i s a well-known accident caused by the discoordination between the human and the automated aircraft. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.