Enhancement of Air Traffic Controller's Task Engagement for Smooth Transition from Supervisory to Manual Control
M. Kim (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
Clark Borst – Mentor (TU Delft - Control & Simulation)
Max Mulder – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Control & Simulation)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
To meet the increasing demands of air traffic, automated systems have been introduced to help air traffic controllers cope with the increasing air traffic in the next two decades. A challenge is that the supervision and evaluation of automated conflict detection and resolution tools have to be performed by human air traffic controllers. These can suffer from vigilance and complacency problems in an extreme supervisory control environment, possibly reducing safety, together with an inability of human controllers to take over when the automation fails. In this study, a form of situation awareness feedback was used to assist controllers in maintaining their task engagement during the supervisory control, and increasing their manual control performance, in the presence of an automation failure. Results from a human-in-the-loop experiment, in which eight participants were instructed to monitor a fully automated air traffic control system and performing manual conflict resolution tasks when the automated system ceased to work, revealed a significant decrease in a workload peak briefly after the automation failure. Although the selected method of asking task-related situation awareness questions to controllers did not necessarily yield improved safety and control efficiency, the results from the experiment suggest that utilizing situation awareness feedback in line with controllers’ attention is an avenue worth exploring further.