Enhancement of Air Traffic Controller's Task Engagement for Smooth Transition from Supervisory to Manual Control

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.Aerospace Engineerin

Situation Awareness Prompts: Bridging the Gap between Supervisory and Manual Air Traffic Control

To meet increasing safety and performance demands in air traffic control (ATC), more advanced automated systems will be introduced to assist human air traffic controllers. Some even foresee complete automation, with the human as a supervisor only to step-in when automation fails. Literature and empirical evidence suggest that supervising highly-automated systems can cause severe vigilance and complacency problems, out-of-the-loop situation awareness and transient workload peaks. These impair the ability for humans to successfully take over control. In this study, situation awareness prompts were used as a way to keep controllers cognitively engaged during their supervision of a fully automated ATC system. Results from an exploratory human-in-the-loop experiment, in which eight participants were instructed to monitor a fully automated ATC system in a simplified ATC context, show a significant decrease in workload peaks following an automation failure after being exposed to high-level SA questions. Although the selected method did not necessarily yield improved safety and manual control efficiency, results suggest that using situation awareness feedback in line with controllers' attention could be an avenue worth exploring further as a training tool.Control & Simulatio