Spread of Situation Awareness in a Group: Population-Based vs. Agent-Based Modelling

This paper compares population-based and agent-based simulation of the dynamics of group Situation Awareness. The question how Situation Awareness spreads among a team of agents is important for numerous applications. In this paper, a population-based and an agent-based model of this process are proposed, and applied to a case study in aviation. A number of relevant simulations of the models are performed, to investigate whether the behaviour of the population-based model can approximate the pattern produced by the agent-based model. It was demonstrated that, especially for larger populations, the dynamics of the agent-based simulations can be approximated by population-based simulations, since both models demonstrate a similar pattern.