Re-design of an Inbound Planning Interface for Air Traffic Control

Abstract

In the coming decades, the task of an air traffic controller is expected to shift to one of strategic, trajectorybased air traffic management. This form of air traffic control is no longer possible without the help of automated support tools. In previous research, it has been shown that the time-space diagram, combined with a conventional plan view display is a good candidate for supporting an air traffic controller with the inbound planning task in the future situation. However, in this initial study, the vertical plane was not yet fully included. Secondly, during an initial validation experiment, creating and maintaining a 'mental picture' of the traffic was reported to be a difficult task. These findings lead to the re-design of the interface in the current research, which focuses on implementing the vertical plane and improving the integration of information across the successive displays. An experiment has been performed with a PC-based simulation which validates that the enhanced interface can be used to manage the air traffic safely and efficiently. Secondly, it has been shown that the ability to manipulate the speed of an aircraft in the adjacent sector can significantly increase situation awareness and reduce controller workload.

An Ecological Approach to the Supervisory Control of UAV Swarms

“…That way, it is hypothesized that operators are supported in their mission management tasks during familiar, unfamiliar, and unanticipated events [18]. The EID approach has already shown promising results, not just in process control where it originated, but also in a military setting [21,22], in car driving [23] and aviation [24,25,26,27]. The resulting interface is expected to give operators a better understanding of the system and enable them to creatively solve arising problems, without being limited to prescribed solutions.…”