Cross-sector transferability of metrics for air traffic controller workload

Journal Article (2016)
Author(s)

SMB Abdul Rahman

Clark Borst (TU Delft - Control & Simulation)

MM van Paassen (TU Delft - Control & Simulation)

M Mulder (TU Delft - Control & Operations)

Copyright
© 2016 S.M.B. Abdul Rahman, C. Borst, M.M. van Paassen, Max Mulder
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2016.10.561
More Info
expand_more
Publication Year
2016
Language
English
Copyright
© 2016 S.M.B. Abdul Rahman, C. Borst, M.M. van Paassen, Max Mulder
Issue number
19
Volume number
49
Pages (from-to)
313-318
Reuse Rights

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

Air traffc controller workload is an important impediment to air transport growth. Several approaches exist that aim to better understand the causes for workload, and models have been derived to predict workload in new operational settings. These methods often relate workload to the diffculty, or complexity, that an average controller would have to safely manage all traffc in a sector with a particular traffc demand. In this paper, several of these complexity-based metrics for workload will be compared. Of special interest is whether the complexity measures transfer from one sector design to another. That is, does a metric that is well-tuned to predict workload for controllers working in one sector, also predict the workload for another group of controllers active in a different sector? Results from a human-in-the-loop experiment show that a solution space-based metric, which requires no tuning or weighing at all, has the highest correlations with subjectively reported workload, and also yields the best workload predictions across different controller groups and sectors.