Guiding Visual Attention to Relevant Flights in Supporting Air Traffic Controller Decision Making

Abstract

Enroute Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs) determine the appropriate course of action by scanning radar displays to identify and select a flight that requires clearances to ensure safe and efficient operations within their airspace sector. After selecting a flight of interest, ATCOs visually compare the flight parameter displayed in the flight labels to assess the impact of potential flight control actions on the sector safety. Expected surge in global air traffic will make it difficult for ATCOs to compare flight parameters, leading to delayed responses and increased workload. This research proposes a flight filtering mechanism based on interacting flight trajectories with spatio-temporal proximities to guide ATCOs’ attention toward potential interaction flights after selecting a flight of interest. ATCOs will find potential interaction flights more saliently as non-interacting flights fade once the flight of interest is selected. This approach targets ATCO’s pre-attentive phase of visual processing, alleviating additional perceptual and cognitive efforts in finding and processing information during conflict detection and previewing clearances. Experiment results with eight subject matter experts as participants showed no significant differences in the safety, operator performance, and perceived workload while controlling traffic due to demanding task requirements and strategy variation among participants. Nonetheless, participants expressed positive feedback regarding the assistance offered by filtering in fading non-interacting flights. No significant differences in objective measures coupled with filtering’s positive perceptions indicate filtering did not negatively affect the performance, suggesting further research with optimal balance between task requirements and participant expertise to evaluate the flight filtering concept.