MOMUx: A Catalyst for Discovering Situational Awareness and Team Coordination Requirements for Human-Autonomy Teaming

Paper accepted to RE2026 - See you in Montreal!

Multi-Operator, Multi-UAV (MOMU) environments impose substantial cognitive demands on human teams supervising autonomous swarms under dynamic and safety-critical conditions, with similar challenges arising in other autonomous swarming domains. Many documented failures involve breakdowns in human situational awareness and team coordination, triggered by previously unrecognized conditions (unknown unknowns) that lead to hazardous situations. This motivates a shift from reactive practices, where new requirements are discovered only when failures occur, towards proactive, safety-driven requirements discovery. Unfortunately, existing requirement elicitation practices offer limited support for proactively identifying situational awareness and team coordination failures under high workload and time pressures. We address this challenge through introducing a novel Multi-Operator, Multi-UAV eXperimental platform (MOMUx), which provides a high-fidelity simulation environment that serves as a catalyst for identifying MOMU interaction failures. MOMUx provides a low-risk environment for collecting multi-modal human-factor data in simulation, integrates the data into a mission timeline, and uses this to identify short, time-bounded Coordination and Awareness Degradation Events (CADEs) capturing breakdowns in situational awareness and team coordination. These events guide the analysis and specification of missing requirements. We use MOMUx to study 12 teams supervising swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), identify 35 CADEs which were distilled into 24 new and clarifying requirements, and demonstrate that these requirements are relevant to real-world settings.

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REPO STRUCTURE

Here is a link to the Glossary of Terms in our project.

Here is a link of Coordination and Awareness Degradation Events (CADEs) with their requirement category.

Here is a link to the requirements overview.

Here is a link to the SAGAT overview and data.

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CITATION

To ackowledge all effort, please cite our paper:

RE 2026 paper (link coming soon!)

@InProceedings{Olesk_2026_RE,
    author    = {Olesk, Johanna and Russell Bernal, Arturo Miguel and Cleland-Huang, Jane},
    title     = {MOMUx: A Catalyst for Discovering Situational Awareness and Team Coordination Requirements for Human-Autonomy Teaming},
    booktitle = {2026 IEEE 34th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)},
    year      = {2026},
}