Investigations of decision support systems - to date, manned space flight has been conducted under close supervision from mission control. Astronauts have been provided with extensive repetitive…

Investigations of decision support systems - to date, manned space flight has been conducted under close supervision from mission control. Astronauts have been provided with extensive repetitive practice for highly scripted missions. Whenever unexpected situations were encountered, they have relied on mission-control and ground resources for decision support. However, in the future, missions may last much longer and may involve substantial periods when the crew will be out of synchronous communication with earth-based resources. During these periods, the crew will need to make decisions autonomously. Automated decision support tools may provide one means of support for crews during these times. Tools could be developed that would compensate for human information processing constraints and decision biases. However, IT is not clear how these tools should be structured. In particular, IT is not clear whether IT is possible to develop useful general purpose decision support tools or whether any tools that are developed will need to be highly task specific and therefore of more limited value. In this project, we propose to review the state of the art of decision support systems and begin research to determine whether tools can be developed that can provide general decision support by compensating for human constraints and decision-making biases without causing new problems. Humans suffer from a variety of information processing constraints and decision biases that interfere with our ability to make optimal choices in may situations. Decision support tools offer one means of attempting to compensate for some of these constraints and biases. As manned spaceflight progresses beyond the earth-moon system, IT will become increasingly important for crews to be able to act autonomously in identifying problems, developing solutions, and making decisions. Decision support tools could be developed to support these missions. However, IT is not clear that these tools are capable of providing the type and degree of assistance that would prove useful to an autonomous crew. To be useful under these conditions, a decision support tool would need to be able handle a wide variety of problems, some of which might not have been anticipated during its development. The tools would need to be able to compensate for known human constraints (e.g., limited short term and long term memory) and decision biases (e.g., framing effects, reliance of sub-optimal heuristics) without causing new problems. In particular, IT should not interfere with the crew ability to identify and solve problems that the system cannot handle properly. IT should also not be so intrusive and cumbersome that IT is abandoned.