Solution-Space–Based Analysis of Dynamic Air Traffic Controller Workload

Abstract

Air traffic controller workload is considered to be a limiting factor to air traffic growth. Previous research introduced the static solution space approach to assess the difficulty of aircraft merging tasks. In this paper the dynamic, tangent-based solution space will be introduced that includes the future trajectory intent of all aircraft. Metrics derived from the solution space, together with common metrics, were tested for correlations with controller workload. An experiment has been conducted where subjects were required to line up all aircraft in a sector towards a certain waypoint, while periodically rating their workload. High correlations were found between several solution space related metrics and subjective workload ratings. In contrast to the number of aircraft metric, which had the highest correlation with workload, the dynamic solution space may allow for controller workload prediction in realtime.

Solution-Space-based ATC Support for 4DT Heterogeneous Aircraft-Mix Control

“…The TSR is based on earlier designs on collision detection and resolution of aircraft in cockpit [19] and air traffic control [24], but extended to 4DT operations, in a way proposed earlier in [20]. It will be briefly explained at the hand of Fig.…”

Empirical exploration of air traffic and human dynamics in terminal airspaces

“…Speed and heading vectoring is the primary means to avoid conflict and keep required headway in controlled flows. The solution space of potential conflict is defined as the 2-D area of continuous heading-and-speed space (d'Engelbronner et al, 2015). In practice, however, the solution space changes with solution strategy (e.g.…”

Impact of Trajectories’ Uncertainty in Existing ATC Complexity Methodologies and Metrics for DAC and FCA SESAR Concepts

“…Both solutions, DAC and FCA, rely on traffic flow complexity assessment processes [7], methods [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] and metrics [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32], and integrate predicted workload function and confidence index. Despite the number of methodologies and metrics developed to measure complexity, there is no single agreed definition and several definitions of complexity could be used.…”