A systematic method to perform goal directed task analysis with application to enterprise architecture

Abstract

Situation awareness (SA), the perception of the elements in the environment (level 1), the comprehension of their meaning (level 2), and the projection of their state in the future (level 3) is known to affect the performance of system operators who work in complex environments. Given the importance of SA in achieving goals and avoiding fatal errors, SA-oriented design has emerged as an approach to design human-machine systems that promote a high degree of SA. To design such systems, the first step is to create SA requirements—i.e., a list of SA elements—that will be translated later to design a system that promotes the SA of its operators. Goal-directed task analysis (GDTA) is a commonly used method for identifying SA requirements. However, GDTA has several shortcomings: it is broad, conceptual, and generic, and it is not clear from the literature how to perform GDTA in practice, that is, there are no explicit and systematic guidelines for performing GDTA. This shortfall may lead the SA analyst to create incomplete and/or erroneous SA requirements. This is problematic because those requirements will be adopted to design and evaluate a system that promotes SA and consequently, the incompleteness and/or errors in the list of SA elements will lead to design problems. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to design a method that guides GDTA practitioners in performing GDTA in explicit, systematic, and traceable steps, and to extend the application of GDTA outside the system design field to the documentation field. The present manuscript-based thesis is made up of three studies each of which aims to achieve a specific objective: the first study explored how GDTA is performed in practice; the second study designed a method to perform GDTA in a systematic and explicit way based on the best practices documented in the literature and ISO 15939; and the third study extends the application of the SA model outside the system design field by proposing a method based on GDTA and ISO 15939 to evaluate a non-procedural technical document. The findings of this thesis contribute to highlight 1) the shortfalls in performing GDTA; 2) the advancement of GDTA research and practice by proposing a concrete, applicable, systematic, and literaturebased method to perform GDTA; and 3) how the SA model and GDTA can be applied outside the system design field, to the technical document field, which shows researchers and practitioners the importance of considering the SA model in technical document evaluation.

Date	24 Oct 2021
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	James Lapalme (Supervisor) & Alexandre Moïse (Co-supervisor)