A systematic review of cognitive and social factors in vessel traffic services operations

Notes

Sharma, A., Mallam, S., MacKinnon, S.N. and Sætrevik, B. (2026) 'A systematic review of cognitive and social factors in vessel traffic services operations', *Transport Reviews*, 46(2), pp. 322–343. doi: 10.1080/01441647.2025.2569578. Open Access (CC BY 4.0). PRISMA systematic review of empirical research (2000–2023) on the cognitive and social factors shaping the performance of vessel traffic service (VTS) operators — shore-based maritime traffic supervisors. A Boolean search across six databases returned 600 records, reduced to 19 included articles after de-duplication, screening, full-text review and citation analysis. Findings were synthesised under six factors: fatigue, mental workload, communication, decision making, perception and coordination. Fatigue and mental workload were the most-discussed cognitive factors; communication and decision making the most-featured by occurrence (each 18.2% of factor mentions). Gaps: no included study focused on attention, shared mental models or vigilance, and the review did not test causal links between factors. Routed to remote-operations-kb on supervisory-control / control-centre grounds — VTS is a shore-based traffic-supervision centre, the maritime counterpart to ATC.

RAW PDF carries a journal-page offset from the Taylor & Francis cover sheet: orig. printed p. = PDF p. + 320 (PDF p. 2 = orig. p. 322; PDF p. 23 = orig. p. 343). 23 pages total.

```bibtex
@article{sharma2026systematic,
  author  = {Sharma, Amit and Mallam, Steven and MacKinnon, Scott N. and S{\ae}trevik, Bj{\o}rn},
  title   = {A systematic review of cognitive and social factors in vessel traffic services operations},
  journal = {Transport Reviews},
  year    = {2026},
  volume  = {46},
  number  = {2},
  pages   = {322--343},
  doi     = {10.1080/01441647.2025.2569578}
}
```

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