Pilot and controller workload and situation awareness with three traffic management concepts

Abstract

This paper reports on workload and situation awareness of pilots and controllers participating in a human-in-the-loop simulation using three different distributed air-ground traffic management concepts. Eight experimental pilots started the scenario in the en-route phase of flight and were asked to avoid convective weather while performing spacing and merging tasks along with a continuous descent approach (CDA) into Louisville Standiford Airport (SDF). Two controllers managed the sectors through which the pilots flew, with one managing a sector that included the Top of Descent, and the other managing a sector that included the merge point for arrival into SDF. At 3-minute intervals in the scenario, pilots and controllers were probed on their workload or situation awareness. We employed one of three concepts of operation that distributed separation responsibility across human controllers, pilots, and automation to measure changes in operator workload and situation awareness. We found that when pilots were responsible for separation, they had higher levels of awareness, but not necessarily higher levels of workload. When controllers are responsible and actively engaged, they showed higher workload levels compared to pilots and changes in level awareness that were dependent on sector characteristics.

Design and evaluation of NextGen aircraft separation assurance concepts

“…The study presented flights through and around weather during the cruise phase of flight, and for which the differing allocations were examined. Previous papers have reported subjective and performance data for the cruise phase in this study [18][19]. However, each of the flights in this study culminated with a final weather free arrival phase down to the meter fix during which ATCs were always responsible for separation management, but there has been only a limited examination of how the cruise phase functional allocation affected performance associated with the arrival phase.…”

“…Pseudo-pilot stations were operated by awareness and workload probes administered at 3-minute intervals asked both pilots and controllers to subjectively rate their workload and answer descriptive questions about their situation awareness. The readers are referred to [18][19]21] for more details. …”

“…The results on pilot and controller situation awareness and workload have been reported in a number of papers [18,19,21] and will only be summarized here. In general, it was found that pilots had the highest situation awareness in Concept 1 (Pilot Primary), when they were most actively engaged in and responsible for separation assurance.…”

Diagnosticity of an online query technique for measuring pilot situation awareness in nextgen

“…Conflicts were also resolved from the ground by requesting automatically generated resolutions from the Auto-Resolver tool. Controllers also responded to situation awareness questions in similar fashion to pilots, but controller data are not presented here (for additional information regarding ATC performance see [24,25]. )…”

Distribution of Conflict Detection of Aircraft for Next Generation Flight Management Systems

“…These studies focus on how the new systems will affect air traffic controllers and pilots. In addition, the affect on the awareness of air traffic controllers is also analyzed as the systems are meant to support air traffic controllers, not replace them [9,29,32].…”