Display of Information for Time-Critical Decision Making
This addresses the challenge of designing flexible human-computer interfaces for monitoring applications, though it appears incremental in applying decision-theoretic methods to display control.
The paper tackles the problem of managing information complexity for high-stakes, time-critical decision-making by introducing EVRI and EVDI measures to enhance computer displays, with application to NASA Mission Control Center monitoring.
We describe methods for managing the complexity of information displayed to people responsible for making high-stakes, time-critical decisions. The techniques provide tools for real-time control of the configuration and quantity of information displayed to a user, and a methodology for designing flexible human-computer interfaces for monitoring applications. After defining a prototypical set of display decision problems, we introduce the expected value of revealed information (EVRI) and the related measure of expected value of displayed information (EVDI). We describe how these measures can be used to enhance computer displays used for monitoring complex systems. We motivate the presentation by discussing our efforts to employ decision-theoretic control of displays for a time-critical monitoring application at the NASA Mission Control Center in Houston.