Vigilance taxonomy in safety-critical monitoring systems (SCMS)

Research on vigilance indicates that human vigilance levels are affected by several factors. Research in the fields of psychology and human factors address aspects such as fatigue, drugs, lack of training, and involvement in other tasks, and their effect on human vigilance. This dissertation provides a structural organization of research literature related to the topic of vigilance in SCMS, by providing the Vigilance Taxonomy in Safety-Critical Monitoring Systems, the main contribution of this research.; The Taxonomy serves as a framework for researchers to conduct further investigations on this important topic of vigilance in SCMSs. The first category in the Taxonomy contains the components that make up an SCMS. These components then serve as headers for the further breakdown of the Taxonomy. The next category in the Taxonomy covers the different factors that may affect vigilance in SCMSs. These factors are grouped in the Taxonomy based on the system component to which they relate. The third category includes the different values these factors may exhibit. The fourth and fifth categories in the Taxonomy include the effects of these factors on vigilance and the references to previous research in which they have been investigated, if they exist. The Taxonomy also aims to serve designers of SCMS, by serving as a roadmap that enables them to see the different factors that may affect user vigilance in their designs, thus, make better choices.; The dissertation research then demonstrates the usefulness of the Taxonomy by using it as a framework for the formation of hypotheses for an experiment that investigated the effect of four different SCMS design variations on user vigilance. The experiment is meant to be a proof of concept on how this Taxonomy is useful to both researchers and designers. Statistical analysis of the data collected during the experiment revealed that all factors of the experiment were significant in one or more of the measures, implying that varying system design does indeed affect user vigilance. And since user vigilance is crucial to the safety of SCMSs, varying the design of SCMS can lead to safer and more secure SCMSs. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...