Future air traffic management concepts envisage shared decision-making responsibilities between controllers and pilots, necessitating that controllers be supported by automated decision aids. Even as automation tools are being introduced, however, their impact on the air traffic controller is not well understood. The present experiments examined the effects of an aircraft-to-aircraft conflict decision aid on performance and mental workload of experienced, full-performance level controllers in a simulated Free Flight environment. Performance was examined with both reliable (Experiment 1) and inaccurate automation (Experiment 2). The aid improved controller performance and reduced mental workload when it functioned reliably. However, detection of a particular conflict was better under manual conditions than under automated conditions when the automation was imperfect. Potential or actual applications of the results include the design of automation and procedures for future air traffic control systems.

Automation in future air traffic management: effects of decision aid reliability on controller performance and mental workload.

Objective: This study examined whether benefits of conflict probe automation would occur in a future air traffic scenario in which air traffic service providers (ATSPs) are not directly responsible for freely maneuvering aircraft but are controlling other nonequipped aircraft (mixed-equipage environment). The objective was to examine how the type of automation imperfection (miss vs. false alarm) affects ATSP performance and attention allocation. Background: Research has shown that the type of automation imperfection leads to differential human performance costs. Method: Participating in four 30-min scenarios were 12 full-performance-level ATSPs. Dependent variables included conflict detection and resolution performance, eye movements, and subjective ratings of trust and self confidence. Results: ATSPs detected conflicts faster and more accurately with reliable automation, as compared with manual performance. When the conflict probe automation was unreliable, conflict detection performance declined with both miss (25% conflicts detected) and false alarm automation (50% conflicts detected). Conclusion: When the primary task of conflict detection was automated, even highly reliable yet imperfect automation (miss or false alarm) resulted in serious negative effects on operator performance. Application: The further in advance that conflict probe automation predicts a conflict, the greater the uncertainty of prediction; thus, designers should provide users with feedback on the state of the automation or other tools that allow for inspection and analysis of the data underlying the conflict probe algorithm.

Transitioning to future air traffic management: effects of imperfect automation on controller attention and performance.

To assess the benefits and limits of a new spacing instruction from flight crew perspectives, a pilot-in-the-loop experiment was conducted. Beyond assessing interface usability and overall feasibility, the experiments aimed at analysing the impact of various tolerance margins on flight crew activity and efficiency. Flight crew feedback was generally positive. Despite a new task in the cockpit, which requires appropriate assistance to contain workload, pilots highlighted the positive aspects of getting in the loop, understanding their situation (through goal-oriented instructions), and gaining anticipation. Results showed that even though the smallest tolerance margin (0.25NM) led to increased workload, the spacing deviation was usually below 0.5NM.

Introducing a New Spacing Instruction. Impact of Spacing Tolerance on Flight Crew Activity

The safe and efficient management of an airline is a complex cognitive task involving many individuals working in close coordination. Unfortunately, the current models and assumptions upon which airline operations support systems are designed are not appropriate for dynamic work environments such as airline operations, and are not consistent with the activities observed there. A new way to approach the design of support systems is proposed whereby the system is viewed as a joint-cognitive system where human cognition must regulate two dynamic systems simultaneously, i.e., the internal system (the human) and the external system, e.g., the flight schedule as they both change in response to context. In this thesis a model of control which consists of three contextual control modes (CCMs) is used as a framework to represent the changes in patterns of behavior in response to context. Using this framework the thesis demonstrates three distinct contributions. First, it provides a theoretical foundation relating the high level constructs of contextual control modes to engineering design. Second, it formulates a method of designing cognitive work support systems using the CCMs. Third, it demonstrates these capabilities and benefits of CCM in a relevant domain. 
The thesis begins by examining the evolution of human performance modeling from the initial stimulus-response methods introduced during the industrial revolution to model factory worker productivity, continues with a discussion of the information processing model where human cognition was modeled as a series of actions carried out in a predefined order, and ends with the concept of cognitive control whereby cognition is not considered a context-free mental process but modeled as an individual's ability to maintain control under varying contexts and to counter the effects of disturbances. The results from a preliminary evaluation conducted to determine if CCMs could be measured and if they provided any additional insight cognitive work are presented, and reveal that CCMs could be measured and the self-assessed CCM varied as predicted. A design process is developed which utilizes the CCMs as representing specific patterns of activity, thus specifying the design requirements. Following this design process, a prototype is created and evaluated using a controlled experiment to examine the effectiveness of the CWSS. The experiment examines performance, workload, and patterns of activity, and has several interesting findings. The first is that performance was independent of the almost all of the predictors and covariates including participant's Self-assessed CCM, with the exception of CCM transitions. As in the preliminary study, participants who reported transitioning between CCMs also reported decreased performance, increased frustration and actually performed worse. Second, perceived performance varied linearly with a participant's self-assessed CCM, but not with the actual performance. Third, participants report lower levels of effort when using a CWSS DM that matched their operational CCM. Finally, the design process successfully created a CWSS with DMs which support strategic and tactical CCMs. Unfortunately, no specific performance improvements were found for cases where the participant's CCM matched the DM as hypothesized, calling into question the effectiveness of creating different design modes for performance improvement. 
This thesis presents two methods for measuring CCMs: one direct single scale and one indirect composite scale. The measurements correlate highly. Both have a high degree of face validity and user acceptance. In the end, the composite measure may be a more robust measure of CCM because it provides a greater degree of diagnosticity by specifically inquiring after different aspects of CCM and is less susceptible to an individual's interpretation of the relative importance of the multiple dimensions of CCMs included in the definitions.

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Design of cognitive work support systems for airline operations

Purpose – Air traffic resources mainly include two parts, namely, air traffic controller (ATC) and physical system resources, such as airspace. Reasonable assessment and effective management of ATC and airspace resources are the premise and foundation of ensuring the safety and efficiency of air traffic management systems. The previous studies focussed on subjective workload control and the statistics of control communication time; they revealed the lack of kinetic universality analyses of controlling actions. Although frequency distribution patterns were generated by controlling the timing sequence, the correlation between the controlling actions and terminal airspace (TMA) sector capacity was not revealed. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Thus, given the immeasurable complexity of controlling actions and statistical features of the controlling communications, a dynamical model of ATC was built in this study to identify the frequency distribution patterns generated by...

Terminal airspace sector capacity estimation method based on the ATC dynamical model

Measuring controller reactions to free flight in a complex transition sector

The world community of aviation operations is engaged in a vast, system-wide evolution of procedures, technologies and services that significantly affect human/system integration. The nature of this evolution is relaxation of restrictions in air transport operations wherever feasible. The relaxation includes schedule control, route control, and, potentially, separation authority in some phases of flight, for example aircraft self-separation in enroute. The dynamic concept of operations provides new challenge to the human operators of that system. The human operators (pilots, air traffic controllers, and airline operations personnel) must monitor system performance as they do now, but also predict the impact of the distribution of authority and control that might result as a function of the airspace configuration, aircraft state or equipage, and other operational constraints [9, 10]. In order to safely and effectively define the new process and procedures for this evolving concept, the human operator’s performance must be clearly and consistently included in the design of the new operation and of any automation aiding that is proposed to help the operators in their distributed activities. The experiment reported here was undertaken to characterize the impact of a shift in separation authority on controller performance in a complex center operation. Controllers managed simulated air traffic in the OCALA sector of the Jacksonville Center. Controllers managed the traffic under conditions of full positive ground control under two operating conditions and two levels of separation authority being ceded to aircraft. Measurements were made across a range of operational and operator variables. Significant differences in both operational and subjective measures were found in response to the primary manipulation of control authority.

John Lane

Papers

Measuring controller reactions to free flight in a complex transition sector

Air-ground Integration Dynamics in Exchange of Information for Control