Mitigating Supervisory-level Interruptions in Mission Control Operations

This paper introduces a new interruption recovery tool designed to mitigate the negative effects of interruptions on team supervisors in complex, mission control operations. This tool, called the Interruption Recovery Assistance (IRA) tool, provides team supervisors with a visual summary of historical mission changes, in the form of an event timeline. It also enables supervisors to gather more information about a desired event in the context of the primary task display. An initial user study is discussed, which provided mixed results: negative impacts were observed for recovery time, while positive impacts were observed for decision accuracy, especially in complex situations.