Event Representations: Communicating Change Information in Supervisory Control

There has traditionally been relatively little emphasis on temporal and event-oriented information in the cognitive engineering literature on representation design for supervisory control environments. Not surprisingly perhaps, current methods in these settings for capturing and representing events (patterns of behavior in the monitored system), are relatively crude. The need for more sophisticated representations of this type of information will become increasingly urgent as a result of evolving operations practices in many industries. This paper presents an argument for the importance of event information and briefly reviews how current representational techniques can make events hard for operators to observe and interpret. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges to be met in developing a principled basis for the design of more effective event representations.