APPLICATION OF NATURALISTIC DECISION MAKING TO THE DOMAIN OF UNMANNED AIR VEHICLES OPERATIONS.

Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) explains how decisions are made in dynamic, precise and sensitive settings such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) operations, fire events, nuclear power plant processes and put forward that people decide on a diagram arose from past experience before carrying the necessary action. The use of UAVs in the military is mounting due to a diminishing tolerance of societies to losses in human life, advances in technology, augmentation of the effective impact power of defense systems, and advances in information systems, robot, and artificial intelligence technologies. Conversely, the current state of UAV technology places additional demands on the human control pilot’s situational awareness and ability to adapt to dynamic combat environments, because intelligent autonomous systems capable of decreasing human piloting errors are still far away from the status quo. Understanding how decision errors in UAV operations arise in accident situations are vital for realignment of the organizational context to mitigate or eliminate decision errors. This paper reports an analysis of UAV operations within the context of Klein’s (1993) recognition-primed decision-making (RPD) model, proposes a modification to the RPD model to incorporate Crew Resource Management (UAV CRM-RPD), and sets forth a research agenda for future testing and validation of the UAV CRM-RPD model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]