Conformal automation for air traffic control using convolutional neural networks

Lack of trust has been identified as an obstacle in the introduction of workload-alleviating automation in air traffic control. The work presented in this paper describes a concept to generate individual-sensitive resolution advisories for air traffic conflicts, with the aim of increasing acceptance by adapting advisories to different controller strategies. These personalized advisories are achieved using a tailored convolutional neural network model that is trained on individual controller data. In this study, a human-in-the-loop experiment was performed to generate datasets of conflict geometries and controller resolutions, with a velocity obstacle representation as a learning feature. Results show that the trained models can reasonably predict command type, direction and magnitude. Furthermore, a correlation is found between controller consistency and achieved prediction performance. A comparison between individual-sensitive and general models showed a benefit of individually trained models, confirming the strategy heterogeneity of the population, which is a critical assumption for personalized automation.