Quantitative analysis of team communication for maritime collaborative task performance improvement

Poor communication may cause serious maritime accidents. In order to improve crews' collaborative task performance through team communication optimization, the present study implements a combination of social network analysis and speech-act coding analysis to quantitatively characterizes team communication. Twenty-one teams of eighty-four participants were recruited for an experiment in which they were instructed to perform three kinds of simulated collaborative tasks that are typical for maritime crews. Team communication was recorded using cameras and expert observation. The participants were divided into two groups according to task performance, and an independent sample t-test was used for group verification. The experimental results show that the high task performance group had a significantly shorter task completion time than that of the low task performance group. Besides, there existed significant differences in the communication mode adopted by the two groups. Compared with the low task performance group, the high task performance group exhibited a denser and more decentralised communication structure. They also had a stronger perception, deeper understanding, and greater prediction of communication content, which indicates better situation awareness. This study provides a theoretical basis and supporting data for improving crews’ collaborative task performance according to the quantitative analysis of team communication.