Applying the theories and measures of situation awareness to the rail industry

This chapter provides an introduction to some of the basic issues around situation awareness, some of the key theories and some of the ways that situation awareness can be measured in the context of rail operations. The first part of this chapter deals with theories of individual and shared situation awareness and will be of particular interest to the human factors practitioner who wishes to know more details about the different ways that people have thought about situation awareness. The first two sections of this first part will be useful for the reader who is interested in learning more about situation awareness but has a limited knowledge of human factors. The second part of the chapter deals with issues around measuring situation awareness and will be of interest to both human factors practitioners and those who are required to exercise due diligence in the implementation of a new technology. This second part of the chapter also introduces a new method of assessing subjective situation awareness (LETSSA) that is currently being developed by two of the authors.