Effects of Air Route Alternation and Display Design on an Operator’s Situation Awareness, Task Performance and Mental Workload in Simulated Flight Tasks

Abstract

Air route alternation caused by unexpected events in abnormal or emergency situations often produces adverse consequences on an operator’s cognition and behavior in flight tasks. Under such a circumstance, it is especially necessary to examine the utility of the interaction displays usually designed based on the routine environment. This study was aimed to investigate the effects of air route alternation and display design on operators’ situation awareness (SA), task performance and mental workload during simulated flight tasks. Twenty-four participants attended an experiment where they were instructed to perform simulated flight tasks with three types of display designs in both air-route-as-planned and air-route-altered conditions. Subjective measures, behavioral measures and eye movement measures were adopted to assess the participants’ SA, task performance and mental workload. The results show that unexpected air route alternation increases mental workload as well as deteriorates the SA and task performance due to the gap between attention resource demand and supply. Reducing the demand of the operator’s attention resource should be the focus when coping with unexpected events in abnormal situations. In addition, reasonable information layout, such as a center-layout design of the critical decision-making information, is more important than information salience for improving the SA and task performance in abnormal situations. Nevertheless, indicators with a high-salience design, such as a more open window design and immersive design, are still worth recommending.

A situation awareness assessment method based on fuzzy cognitive maps

“…The concept of SA was introduced by the US military in the 1980s and went through a series of debates on the definition of SA and whether it could be defined in the 1980s to 1990s. Now the academic community basically agrees with the three-level model definition of Endsley, the chief scientist of the US Air Force: perception of elements in a given space-time, understanding of the meaning of elements, and prediction of the state of elements over a small period of time in the future [1].…”

“…Each concept node has its own value, which is always a fuzzy value that represents how well the state matches the concept. Values in the interval [1,1] or [0, 1] are usually chosen.…”

“…where W is the weight matrix and C is the node vector, S(•) is the activation function to compress the node value into [0, 1] or [1,1], when the node value is in [0, 1], the activation function is…”

“…Operators of systems will be confronted with more complex and rapidly changing systems. In the decision-making process for dynamic systems, it is becoming apparent that situation awareness (SA) becomes a key component in the decision-making process for dynamic systems [1]. As the name implies, SA studies the understanding and knowledge of the situation under current conditions.…”

Variation of Pilots’ Mental Workload Under Emergency Flight Conditions Induced by Different Equipment Failures: A Flight Simulator Study

“…When emergencies occur, pilots have to process the information on multiple tasks simultaneously, leading to an increase in their mental workload ( 1 ). Although a high mental workload may not have direct adverse consequences, it can lead to fewer residual resources being available for pilots to perform concurrent tasks during emergencies, which may result in task management- and pilot decision-making errors, thereby threatening flight safety ( 2 ).…”