Naturalistic decision-making perspective on uncertainty reduction by civil engineers about the location of underground utilities

Modern engineers must perform their work carefully to avoid damaging buried underground utilities. Before starting ground works the exact location of pipes and cables must be confirmed. Current detection equipment still cannot provide complete certainty and requires extensive training in order to obtain the correct data. Digging test trenches remains an important practical tool to interpret subsurface conditions, but deciding on the number and location of test trenches is problematic. Decisions seem to be taken randomly and are based mostly on intuitive judgments. We conducted interviews and workshops in order to uncover the strategies used to select test trench location. Our results show that choices are influenced significantly by decision-makers’ experience. We describe our findings using Rasmussen’s Skills-Rules-Knowledge model. We propose that any
future decision support system should combine elements from both analytical and naturalistic models.