Static and Motion-Based Visual Features Used by Airport Tower Controllers: Some Implications for the Design of Remote or Virtual Towers

Visual motion and other visual cues are used by tower controllers to provide important support for their control tasks at and near airports. These cues are particularly important for anticipated separation. Some of them, which we call visual features, have been identified from structured interviews and discussions with 24 active air traffic controllers or supervisors. The visual information that these features provide has been analyzed with respect to possible ways it could be presented at a remote tower that does not allow a direct view of the airport. Two types of remote towers are possible. One could be based on a plan-view, map-like computer-generated display of the airport and its immediate surroundings. An alternative would present a composite perspective view of the airport and its surroundings, possibly provided by an array of radially mounted cameras positioned at the airport in lieu of a tower. An initial more detailed analyses of one of the specific landing cues identified by the controllers, landing deceleration, is provided as a basis for evaluating how controllers might detect and use it. Understanding other such cues will help identify the information that may be degraded or lost in a remote or virtual tower not located at the airport. Some initial suggestions how some of the lost visual information may be presented in displays are mentioned. Many of the cues considered involve visual motion, though some important static cues are also discussed

Multiple remote tower for Single European Sky: The evolution from initial operational concept to regulatory approved implementation

The European Union project of Single European Sky initiated a reorganization of European airspace and proposed additional measures for air traffic management to achieve the key objectives of improving efficiency and capacity while at the same time enhancing safety. The concept of multiple remote tower operation is that air traffic controllers (ATCOs) can control several airfields from a distant virtual control centre. The control of multiple airfields can be centralised to a virtual centre permitting the more efficient use of ATCO resources. This research was sponsored by the Single European Sky ATM Research Program and the ATM Operations Division of the Irish Aviation Authority. A safety case was developed for migration of multiple remote tower services to live operations. This research conducted 50 large scale demonstration trials of remote tower operations from single tower operations to multiple tower operations for safety assessment by air navigation safety regulators in 2016. A dedicated team of air traffic controllers and technology experts successfully completed the safety assessment of multiple remote tower operations in real time. The implementation of this innovative technology requires a careful balance between cost-efficiency and the safety of the air traffic control in terms of capacity and human performance. The live trial exercises demonstrated that the air traffic services provided by the remote tower for a single airport and two medium airports by a single ATCO with ‘in sequence’ and ‘simultaneous’ aircraft operation was at least as safe as provided by the local towers at Cork and Shannon aerodromes. No safety occurrence was reported nor did any operational safety issue arise during the conduct of the fifty live trial exercises

Audio Focus: Interactive spatial sound coupled with haptics to improve sound source location in poor visibility

International audienceIn an effort to simplify human resource management and reduce costs, control towers are now more and more designed to not be implanted directly on the airport but remotely. This concept, known as Remote Control Tower, offers a “digital” working context because the view on the runways is broadcast remotely via cameras, which are located on the physical airport. This offers researchers and engineers the possibility to develop novel interaction techniques. But this technology relies on the sense of sight, which is largely used to give the operator information and interaction, and which is now becoming overloaded. In this paper, we focus on the design and the testing of new interaction forms that rely on the human senses of hearing and touch. More precisely, our study aims at quantifying the contribution of a multimodal interaction technique based on spatial sound and vibrotactile feedback to improve aircraft location. Applied to Remote Tower environment, the final purpose is to enhance Air Traffic Controller's perception and increase safety. Three different interaction modalities have been compared by involving 22 Air Traffic Controllers in a simulated environment. The experimental task consisted in locating aircraft in different airspace positions by using the senses of hearing and touch through two visibility conditions. In the first modality (spatial sound only), the sound sources (e.g. aircraft) had the same amplification factor. In the second modality (called Audio Focus), the amplification factor of the sound sources located along the participant's head sagittal axis was increased, while the intensity of the sound sources located outside this axis was decreased. In the last modality, Audio Focus was coupled with vibrotactile feedback to indicate in addition the vertical positions of aircraft. Behavioral (i.e. accuracy and response times measurements) and subjective (i.e. questionnaires) results showed significantly higher performance in poor visibility when using Audio Focus interaction. In particular, interactive spatial sound gave the participants notably higher accuracy in degraded visibility compared to spatial sound only. This result was even better when coupled with vibrotactile feedback. Meanwhile, response times were significantly longer when using Audio Focus modality (coupled with vibrotactile feedback or not), while remaining acceptably short. This study can be seen as the initial step in the development of a novel interaction technique that uses sound as a means of location when the sense of sight alone is not enough

How neurophysiological measures can be used to enhance the evaluation of remote tower solutions

International audienceNew solutions in operational environments are often, among objective measurements, evaluated by using subjective assessment and judgement from experts. Anyhow, it has been demonstrated that subjective measures suffer from poor resolution due to a high intra and inter operator variability. Also, performance measures, if available, could provide just partial information, since an operator could achieve the same performance but experiencing a different workload. In this study we aimed to demonstrate i) the higher resolution of neurophysiological measures in comparison to subjective ones, and ii) how the simultaneous employment of neurophysiological measures and behavioural ones could allow a holistic assessment of operational tools. In this regard, we tested the effectiveness of an EEG-based neurophysiological index (WEEG index) in comparing two different solutions (i.e. Normal and Augmented) in terms of experienced workload. In this regard, 16 professional Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs) have been asked to perform two operational scenarios. Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) has also been recorded to evaluate the level of arousal (i.e. operator involvement) during the two scenarios execution. NASA-TLX questionnaire has been used to evaluate the perceived workload, and an expert was asked to assess performance achieved by the ATCOs. Finally, reaction times on specific operational events relevant for the assessment of the two solutions, have also been collected. Results highlighted that the Augmented solution induced a local increase in subjects performance (Reaction times). At the same time, this solution induced an increase in the workload experienced by the participants (WEEG). Anyhow, this increase is still acceptable, since it did not negatively impact the performance and has to be intended only as a consequence of the higher engagement of the ATCOs. This behavioural effect is totally in line with physiological results obtained in terms of arousal (GSR), that increased during the scenario with augmentation. Subjective measures (NASA-TLX) did not highlight any significant variation in perceived workload. These results suggest that neurophysiological measure provide additional information than behavioural and subjective ones, even at a level of few seconds, and its employment during the pre-operational activities (e.g. design process) could allow a more holistic and accurate evaluation of new solutions

Human-centred design for next generation of air traffic management systems.

Designing and deploying air traffic management systems requires an understanding of cognitive ergonomics, system integration, and human-computer interactions. The aim of this research is to develop an effective Human-centred design for Air Navigation Services Providers to permit more effective air traffic controller training and regulations. Therefore, this research consists of both evaluating human-computer interactions on COOPANS Air Traffic Management system and multiple remote tower operations. The COOPANS Alliance is an international cooperation among the air navigation service providers of Austria, Croatia, Denmark, Ireland, Portugal and Sweden with Thales as the industry supplier. The findings of this project indicate that the context-specified design of semantic alerts could improve ATCO’s situational awareness and significantly reduce response time when responding to aircraft conflict resolution alerts. Civil Aviation Authorities, Air Navigation Service Providers and Air Traffic Management System Providers could all benefit from the findings of this research with a view to ensuring that Air Traffic Controllers are provided with the optimal context-specified alerting schemes to increase their situational awareness during both training and operations. The EU Single European Sky initiative was introduced to restructure European airspace and propose innovative measures for air traffic management to achieve the objectives of enhanced cost-efficiency and improved airspace design and airport capacity whilst simultaneously improving safety performance. There is potential to save approximately €2.21 million Euro per annum per installation of remote tower versus traditional control towers. However, ATCO’s visual attention and monitoring performance can be affected by how information is presented, the complexity of the information presented, and the operating environment in the remote tower centre. To achieve resource-efficient and sustainable air navigation services, there is a need to improve the design of human-computer interactions in multiple remote tower technology deployment. These must align with high technology-readiness levels, operators’ practices, industrial developments, and the certification processes of regulators. From a regulatory perspective the results of this project may contribute to European Aviation Safety Agency rulemaking activity for future Air Traffic Management Systems. Overall, the results of this research are in line with the requirements of Single European Sky and facilitate the harmonisation of European ATM systems.PhD in Transport System

Design and Development of a Research Framework for Prototyping Control Tower Augmented Reality Tools

The purpose of the air traffic management system is to ensure the safe and efficient flow of air traffic. Therefore, while augmenting efficiency, throughput and capacity in airport operations, attention has rightly been placed on doing it in a safe manner. In the control tower, many advances in operational safety have come in the form of visualization tools for tower controllers. However, there is a paradox in developing such systems to increase controllers' situational awareness: by creating additional computer displays, the controller's vision is pulled away from the outside view and the time spent looking down at the monitors is increased. This reduces their situational awareness by forcing them to mentally and physically switch between the head-down equipment and the outside view. This research is based on the idea that augmented reality may be able to address this issue. The augmented reality concept has become increasingly popular over the past decade and is being proficiently used in many fields, such as entertainment, cultural heritage, aviation, military & defense. This know-how could be transferred to air traffic control with a relatively low effort and substantial benefits for controllers’ situation awareness. Research on this topic is consistent with SESAR objectives of increasing air traffic controllers’ situation awareness and enable up to 10 % of additional flights at congested airports while still increasing safety and efficiency. During the Ph.D., a research framework for prototyping augmented reality tools was set up. This framework consists of methodological tools for designing the augmented reality overlays, as well as of hardware and software equipment to test them. Several overlays have been designed and implemented in a simulated tower environment, which is a virtual reconstruction of Bologna airport control tower. The positive impact of such tools was preliminary assessed by means of the proposed methodology

Remote Airport Traffic Control Center (2008 - 2012) Final Presentation and Workshop - Extended Abstracts

The present report contains the extended and revised version of the abstracts collection of the presentations given at the final international workshop of the DLR-project RAiCe (Remote Airport traffic Control Center, 2008 - 2012), held on November 30 2012 in Braunschweig. The RaiCe presentations are complemented by two external contributions,from the Swedish ANSP LFV and company Frequentis, representing the industrial perspective on Remote Tower research and development. The RaiCe workshop was a satellite event of the Second SESAR Innovation Days (SID 2012, Nov. 27-29) which was held in Braunschweig, following the first one in Toulouse 2011. One of the RaiCe validation results papers was presented at SID2012 and is also included in the present report for com-pleteness, besides inclusion in the SID2012 proceedings. In addition to the collection of extended abstracts and an introduction, besides some general refer-ences a list of the publications of the DLR Remote Tower Group (time frame 2002 – 2012) is provid-ed. A list of the workshop participants is added as part of the Appendix

3D-in-2D Displays for ATC.

This paper reports on the efforts and accomplishments of the 3D-in-2D Displays for ATC project at the end of Year 1. We describe the invention of 10 novel 3D/2D visualisations that were mostly implemented in the Augmented Reality ARToolkit. These prototype implementations of visualisation and interaction elements can be viewed on the accompanying video. We have identified six candidate design concepts which we will further research and develop. These designs correspond with the early feasibility studies stage of maturity as defined by the NASA Technology Readiness Level framework. We developed the Combination Display Framework from a review of the literature, and used it for analysing display designs in terms of display technique used and how they are combined. The insights we gained from this framework then guided our inventions and the human-centered innovation process we use to iteratively invent. Our designs are based on an understanding of user work practices. We also developed a simple ATC simulator that we used for rapid experimentation and evaluation of design ideas. We expect that if this project continues, the effort in Year 2 and 3 will be focus on maturing the concepts and employment in a operational laboratory settings

Collaborative decision making in complex work settings: a process of managing inter dependencies

There exists disparity between the conceptualization and occurrence of Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) in everyday work activities of complex work settings. Current notions in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) based on studies of decision making in groups typically portray CDM as an isolated event in which multiple personnel jointly undertake decision making. In the real world, however, decisions are made during work performance and interlaced with other processes and activities. Moreover, the complex work setting is a cooperative arrangement in which decision making is distributed. This research aims to alleviate the disparity by investigating how people in a complex working environment make decisions collaboratively. The original contribution to knowledge made by this thesis is the theory of CDM as a process of managing interdependencies. Field-studies conducted in an airport to examine the way CDM is undertaken during Air Traffic Control operations inform theory development. The study takes a qualitative approach and is guided by Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM). The findings of this research indicate that undertaking decision making in the cooperative arrangement of complex work settings requires managing the distributions and interconnections inherent in this setup. In addition, participation and contribution of personnel in decision making is found to be structured by the dependencies between their activities. These findings form the central focus of the theory leading to the depiction of CDM as a process of managing interdependencies. The theory presented in this thesis clarifies and extends existing views by explicating the differentiated process of CDM in the cooperative arrangement of a complex work setting. Based on this a new definition of CDM is formulated. In addition, a conceptual framework of ten parameters is derived to serve as a tool for analysing CDM taking place in a particular work setting. Application of this framework is demonstrated by analysing an aircraft accident report to draw insights about the occurrence of CDM in this setting