Planning in Air Traffic Control: Impact of Problem Type

Abstract

To characterize the planning activities of en route air traffic controllers, 12 certified professional controllers (CPCs) were placed in the role of planners and verbalized a plan for controlling traffic to a confederate tactician. The tactician, another CPC, implemented the plan. Planning, which is typically tacit, was made explicit by distributing it across these 2 individuals. The sequencing problem, which required the sequencing of aircraft going to a common destination, had a distinct environmental analysis phase (bottom-up) followed by a distinct plan development (top-down) phase. In the crossing problem, which involved aircraft en route to many different

Recall Performance in Air Traffic Controllers Across the 24-hr Day: Influence of Alertness and Task Demands on Recall Strategies

“…As shown by several studies, short-term recall of navigational messages decreases when message length increases beyond three commands (Wickens & Hollands, 2000;Barshi & Healy, 2002;Schneider et al, 2004). Taken together with several other studies, the present results may also be useful for ATC selection and training, as they stress the importance of using tests that manipulate, in addition to the more traditional quantitative aspects of memory, more qualitative parameters, such as presentation modality or information type and aircraft status (Gronlund et al, 2005;Means et al, 1988).…”

“…Thus, expert ATCs show high recall performance of aircrafts and their position on a sector map, and poorer recollection of details regarding an aircraft (Means et al, 1988). Higher recognition accuracy for aircrafts involved in an impending conflict compared to those that would not cross or cross in some near future confirmed the impact of aircraft status on memory performance (Gronlund et al, 1998(Gronlund et al, , 2005. Simulation studies revealed higher recall when navigational messages were presented in the auditory rather than in the visual modality.…”

Mnemonic Processing in Air Traffic Controllers: Effects of Task Parameters and Work Organization

“…Likewise, in agreement with the proposal that the impact of output interference and response set size is reduced in probe recognition compared to free recall (Cowan, Saults, & Brown, 2004), presentation modality and list length affected recognition only in the presence of an additional disrupting factor (time of day). Consequently, investigation of the effects of time of day on ATCs' cognitive processes according to the task used and the task components manipulated may improve our understanding of the more general shift work literature (Folkard, 1990;Monk, Fookson, Moline, & Pollak, 1985) and the more specific ATC simulations studies (Gronlund et al, 2005;Means et al, 1988;Schneider et al, 2004;Wickens & Hollands, 2000) as the findings illustrate that participants' alertness affects task performance according to task demands.…”

“…Better understanding of memory processes and of their limitations in expert ATCs may thus have direct implications for the development of future automation tools, but also for training and selection of controllers (Costa, 1999). Simulation studies revealed that ATCs' recall performance varies according to situation-specific variables, and in particular the amount of information or number of aircraft to be remembered (Schneider, Healy, & Barshi, 2004;Wickens & Hollands, 2000), the type of information relative to an aircraft (aircraft position on the sector map vs. details regarding the aircraft), and aircraft importance (aircraft involved in an impending conflict vs. those not crossing routes or crossing routes in some near future; Gronlund, Dougherty, Durso, Canning, & Mills, 2005;Means et al, 1988). These simulation studies further our understanding of mnemonic aspects of actual controller behavior, although, for obvious reasons, it is difficult to replicate the findings in live traffic situations.…”

Managing emergencies and abnormal situations in air traffic control (part I): Taskwork strategies

“…There is some evidence that the type of problem facing controllers can influence this choice between minimizing versus managing uncertainty. Gronlund et al (2005) found that terminal controllers could anticipate threats in a sequencing problem and a single contingency planning could handle most of the aircraft heading to the same destination. On the contrary, a crossing problem presented controllers with more uncertainty (i.e., aircraft were headed to different points, crossing each other's tracks) and required a regular adaptation of the original plan.…”