Operators in air traffic control facing time‐ and safety‐critical situations call for efficient, reliable and robust real‐time processing and interpretation of complex data. Automation support tools aid controllers in these processes to prevent separation losses between aircraft. Issues of current support tools include limited ‘what‐if’ and ‘what‐else’ probe functionalities in relation to vertical solutions. This work presents the design and evaluation of two visual analytics interfaces that promote contextual awareness and support ‘what‐if’ and ‘what‐else’ probes in the spatio‐temporal domain aiming to improve information integration and support controllers in prioritising conflict resolution. Both interfaces visualize vertical solution spaces against a time‐altitude graph. The main contributions of this paper are: (a) the presentation of two interfaces for supporting conflict solving; (b) the novel representation of how vertical information and aircraft rate of climb and descent affect conflicts and (c) an evaluation and comparison of the interfaces with a traditional air traffic control support system. The evaluation study was performed with domain experts to compare the effects of visualization concepts on operator engagement in processing solutions suggested by the tools. Results show that the visualizations support operators' ability to understand and resolve conflicts. Based on the results, general design guidelines for time‐critical domains are proposed.

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Operational demands in safety‐critical systems impose a risk of failure to the operators especially during urgent situations. Operators of safety‐critical systems learn to make decisions effectively throughout extensive training programs and many years of experience. In the domain of air traffic control, expensive training with high dropout rates calls for research to enhance novices' ability to detect and resolve conflicts in the airspace. While previous researchers have mostly focused on redesigning training instructions and programs, the current paper explores possible benefits of novel visual representations to improve novices' understanding of the situations as well as their decision‐making process. We conduct an experimental evaluation study testing two ecological visual analytics interfaces, developed in a previous study, as support systems to facilitate novice decision‐making. The main contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we describe the application of an ecological interface design approach to the development of two visual analytics interfaces. Second, we perform a human‐in‐the‐loop experiment with forty‐five novices within a simplified air traffic control simulation environment. Third, by performing an expert‐novice comparison we investigate the extent to which effects of the proposed interfaces can be attributed to the subjects' expertise. The results show that the proposed ecological visual analytics interfaces improved novices' understanding of the information about conflicts as well as their problem‐solving performance. Further, the results show that the beneficial effects of the proposed interfaces were more attributable to the visual representations than the users' expertise.

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Automation in today's world supports human operators to accomplish several tasks in limited time. With more advanced automation and autonomous systems, the humans' role is shifting from hands-on operational tasks to supervisory tasks. In complex environments such as air traffic control, supervisory tasks become difficult to manage during unexpected situations as the operator needs to have a clear understanding of various resolution strategies and their consequences and make decisions about them in a limited amount of time (i.e. within a couple of minutes). In such environments, interface designers must carefully consider how information should be presented to the operators. An improper way of presenting information could, wastefully consume operators' cognitive resources resulting in inefficient decision-making and an increased risk of failure.By designing ecological visual analytics interfaces, this thesis addresses the problem of real-time decision-making in the domain of air traffic control. The aim of this thesis has been to apply ecological design theories to the design and evaluation of visual representations to better support controllers' analytical capabilities and decision-making. Four novel visual analytics interfaces were designed, developed, i