Cognitive work analysis (CWA) is a framework that was developed to model a complex sociotechnical system.
The CWA approach can be used to describe the constraints imposed by the purpose of a system, its functional properties, the nature of the activities that are conducted, the roles of the different human actors, and their cognition skills and strategy.
Rather than offer a prescribed methodology, the CWA framework instead acts as a toolkit that can be used either individually or in combination with one another, depending upon the analysis needs.
A common way to structure the work domain analysis is to create an abstraction hierarchy, which includes identifying the systems purpose, values, functions, and physical objects.
From one perspective, a decision tree can be created based on the various steps an operator in the analyzed systems has to make in their work.