The cognitive systems engineering of automated medical evacuation scheduling and its implications

Analyzing the cognitive tasks of operators of future novel systems in order to provide design guidance represents a major challenge to cognitive systems engineering. Cognitive task analysis based on extant systems may not adequately reflect operator tasks after radical organizational and technical change. We describe the results of an effort to analyze a proposed, highly automated system for patient evacuation movement scheduling. The new automation will relieve operators of much of the work of schedule generation, but giving up this task to the machine makes it necessary for users to independently generate estimates of the location of the current problem in the problem space. These estimates were previously obtained as a byproduct of manual scheduling. In this context, decision support largely concerns the construction of this estimate, which then determines the operator´s strategy. This need for problem space estimates is a comprehensible central theme that can serve as an organizing metaphor for system designers