Supporting system acquisition decisions through ecological perception
While there has been significant work in developing methods and algorithms to streamline the system acquisition process, there has been little research on how to display these complex, multivariate trade spaces to the decision maker. In order to determine what type of decision support tool best supports high-level system acquisition decision makers, two graphical decision tools are compared, a configural display and a traditional spreadsheet presentation. Due to their support of ecological perception, configural displays are thought to support both high and low level reasoning in a more effortless and efficient manner. This paper describes the design of a system acquisition configural display and presents the results from an experiment that uses an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) acquisition case study. These results indicate that the configural display is the preferred decision support tool of choice, and it appeared to achieve as high or superior performance as the spreadsheet display, although no statistical differences were found. Copyright © 2009 by Anna Massie.