Studying Shared Situation Awareness by Agent-Based Simulation

Shared Situation Awareness is an often employed concept in domains where teams of agents have to solve complex tasks in a distributed manner, like incident management and air traffic control. Although widely studied in the literature, the concept is difficult to be analyzed in a systematic manner, due to 1) the abundance of factors that can be related to Shared SA, and 2) the lack of a commonly agreed, formal definition. This paper proposes Agent-Based Social Simulation as a scientific method to study questions related to Shared SA. Founded in theories from Social Science, an agent-based framework is presented, which allows users to explore a variety of hypothetical scenarios in an automated manner. The resulting global patterns are illustrated by discussing a number of simulation results for different parameter settings. These simulations show that, although preliminary, the presented framework has potential as an analytical tool for researchers and policy makers.