Information visualization for supporting short-term and long-term situation awareness in ground segments monitoring: application to SWOT command and control operations

The CNES-funded project called STRECCC (STudy and Recommendations for the Ergonomics of Command and Control Centers) studies ground segment interactive applications, their user interfaces, and how the controllers interact with them, to identify solutions ensuring the usability of future, more automated command and control centers. The nature of the operations evolves, along with the skills, knowledge, and expertise of controllers. Their profile evolves being less technical and with less knowledge in the underlying systems or telecommunications. The STRECCC project addresses these evolutions by designing advanced user interfaces improving performance and situation awareness of the controller. The designs deeply exploit knowledge and research contributions in the area of information visualization and Human-Computer Interaction. In this paper, we present the approach, based on task models, we applied to investigate the usability of the SWOT Control and Command Center (CCC). Based on the study we performed, we present two prototypes of interactive visualizations to enhance operations by improving the perception and understanding of numerous information while performing different types of tasks (e.g., identifying a disconnected antenna, comparing the processing state of two telecommands …). From the results of a predictive evaluation and preliminary empirical feedback, they improve the situation awareness of the controllers by providing a long-term (a full week) perspective on recent-past and future operations.