A Survey and Comparison of Human Monitoring of Complex Networks

Abstract

Networks of different types are essential infrastructures for society. Networks such as transportation networks and the electric power grid are becoming increasingly large and complex which create special challenges for human operators who must monitor these networks for safe operation. It is important to understand how human operators monitor these networks and the challenges they face in the monitoring task. In order to do this, we conducted a survey of how human operators monitor various networks water distribution networks, electric power grid, air traffic control, and nuclear power plant networks. From our survey in these specific extensively-studied networks, we are able to generalize the challenges of operators monitoring networks. The hope is that these results will provide human factors engineers with a better understanding so they can cater to the needs of the human operators when designing new interfaces for network monitoring tasks.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 2005
Accession Number
ADA464108

Entities

People

  • Ramona Su
  • William Yurcik

Organizations

  • University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Biomedical
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Traffic
  • Aircrafts
  • Airports
  • Data Acquisition
  • Data Displays
  • Detection
  • Electric Power
  • Electrical Grids
  • Infrastructure
  • Literature Surveys
  • Load Monitoring
  • Monitoring
  • Nuclear Power Plants
  • Public Health
  • Situational Awareness
  • Transportation
  • Voice Communications

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Cybersecurity.
  • Systems Analysis and Design
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.