Supporting air traffic control collaboration with a TableTop system

Abstract

Collaboration is key to safety and efficiency in Air Traffic Control. Legacy paper-based systems enable seamless and non-verbal collaboration, but trends in new software and hardware for ATC tend to separate controllers more and more, which hinders collaboration. This paper presents a new interactive system designed to support collaboration in ATC. We ran a series of interviews and workshops to identify collaborative situations in ATC. From this analysis, we derived a set of requirements to support collaboration: support mutual awareness, communication and coordination, dynamic task allocation and simultaneous use with more than two people. We designed a set of new interactive tools to fulfill the requirements, by using a multiuser tabletop surface, appropriate feedthrough, and reified and partially-accomplishable actions. Preliminary evaluation shows that feedthrough is important, users benefit from a number of tools to communicate and coordinate their actions, and the tabletop is actually usable by three people both in tightly coupled tasks and parallel, individual activities. At a higher level, we also found that co-location is not enough to generate mutual awareness if users are not engaged in realistic tasks.

How do interactive tabletop systems influence collaboration?

“…For example, user studies provided descriptions of collaboration patterns around the tabletop such as turn-taking and parallel collaboration (Shaer et al, 2010), role assignment strategies (Tang, Pahud, Carpendale, & Buxton, 2010), non-verbal behaviors promoting mutual awareness (Conversy et al, 2011), collaborative learning mechanisms such as suggestion process, negotiation, joint attention and awareness maintenance , or subjective benefits of tabletop collaboration (Hartmann, Ringel Morris, Benko, & Wilson, 2010;Smith & Graham, 2010). To explain these benefits, comparative studies have emphasized the positive role of multiple entry points for collaboration (Marshall et al, 2008;Rogers et al, 2009): when compared to a device with a single entry point (e.g.…”

Avalanche Beacon Parks

“…Examples include observational studies of air traffic control [11], health care [3], firefighting [21,39,40], avalanche rescue [13] and realworld emergencies [27]. Researchers have also created new systems to better support training, often focusing on collaborative practices.…”

“…Researchers have also created new systems to better support training, often focusing on collaborative practices. Proposed solutions include tabletop systems [11], wearables [9,22], games [27,40], and virtual environments [28].…”

How social cues shape task coordination and communication

“…Cooperation has been explored in formal work contexts such as managing the London Underground [23] and air traffic control [5], as well as in informal cooperations such as brainstorming [36] and play dates [28]. These CSCW systems tend to display the person via video, the context via video, or both.…”