Towards Human-Automation Teamwork in Shared En-Route Air Traffic Control: Task Analysis

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Abstract

In the quest for more efficient air traffic management, a common approach is to allocate an increasing amount of functionality to higher levels of automation, with a supervisory role for humans. This potentially leads to forthcoming issues such as skill degradation and out-of-the-loop phenomenon. If the traffic in an airspace is instead shared between a human operator and an automated system, with specific flights fully delegated to automation, operators can maintain their skills and stay actively involved in controlling the rest of the traffic. This does, however, lead to new forms of mixed conflicts, where two flights are controlled by different agents. A smart flight allocation strategy, starting with the delegation of basic flights requiring little monitoring or cognitive effort, is expected to improve combined human-automation performance. In this paper, we present flowcharts to model en-route air traffic controller cognitive think and action processes in two core tasks: conflict detection and resolution. We qualitatively describe the impact of delegating flights to automation and the associated introduction of mixed conflicts. Once empirically validated and quantified in follow-up research, these models can be used to design flight allocation strategies for future human-automation teams.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Human-Machine Systems, ICHMS 2022
EditorsDavid Kaber, Antonio Guerrieri, Giancarlo Fortino, Andreas Nurnberger
Place of PublicationOrlando, FL, USA
PublisherIEEE
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-6654-5238-0
ISBN (Print)978-1-6654-5239-7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Human-Machine Systems, ICHMS 2022

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Air traffic control
  • Human-automation teamwork
  • Task analysis

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