Pilot’s Willingness to Operate in Unmanned Aircraft System Integrated Airspace

The interest in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) use for private, civil, and commercial purposes such as package delivery, inspection, surveillance, and passenger and cargo transport has gained considerable momentum. As UAS infiltrate the National Airspace System (NAS), there is a need to not only develop viable, safe, and secure solutions for the co-existence of manned and unmanned aircraft, but also determine public acceptance and pilot’s willingness to operate an aircraft in such an integrated environment. Currently there is little or no research on pilot’s perceptions on their willingness to operate an aircraft in UAS integrated airspace and airports. The purpose of this study was to determine what effect the type of UAS integration, the type of UAS operations, and the airspace classification will have on pilot’s perspectives and willingness to operate an aircraft in UAS integrated airspace and airport environment. This study surveyed the eligible pilot population in hypothetical scenarios using convenience sampling to measure their willingness to operate an aircraft in UAS integrated airspace and airports using the Willingness to Pilot an Aircraft Scale, which has been shown to be valid and reliable by Rice, Winter, Capps, Trombley, Robbins, and Milner (2020). A mixed factorial design was used to study the interaction effects between the independent variables and the effects on the dependent variable, i.e., willingness to pilot an aircraft. The results of the mixed analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated a significant interaction between type of UAS integration and airspace classification. Overall willingness decreased with airspace and differences in willingness to pilot an aircraft were based on segregated and integrated operations. The average pilot’s willingness to pilot an aircraft score differed from the highest score being for Class B, decreasing with decreasing airspace classes, with the lowest being for Class G. Analysis of pilot perspectives collected through open ended questions using text-mining techniques showed agreement with mixed ANOVA analysis that the primary factor in the pilot’s perception was airspace. Key concerns voiced by the pilots were situation awareness, risk and safety of operations, aircraft certification and airworthiness, and operator experience and regulatory conformance. The most positive sentiment was observed among pilots presented with the hypothetical scenario of fully autonomous UAS operations in a segregated environment. Findings from the study could aid regulators in developing better policies, procedures, integration solutions, improved training, and knowledge sharing

IMMACCS: A Multi-Agent Decision-Support System

This report describes work performed by the Collaborative Agent Design Research Center for the US Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory (MCWL), on the IMMACCS experimental decision-support system. IMMACCS (Integrated Marine Multi-Agent Command and Control System) incorporates three fundamental concepts that distinguish it from existing (i.e., legacy) command and control applications. First, it is a collaborative system in which computer-based agents assist human operators by monitoring, analyzing, and reasoning about events in near real-time. Second, IMMACCS includes an ontological model of the battlespace that represents the behavioral characteristics and relationships among real world entities such as friendly and enemy assets, infrastructure objects (e.g., buildings, roads, and rivers), and abstract notions. This object model provides the essential common language that binds all IMMACCS components into an integrated and adaptive decision-support system. Third, IMMACCS provides no ready made solutions that may not be applicable to the problems that will occur in the real world. Instead, the agents represent a powerful set of tools that together with the human operators can adjust themselves to the problem situations that cannot be predicted in advance. In this respect, IMMACCS is an adaptive command and control system that supports planning, execution and training functions concurrently. The report describes the nature and functional requirements of military command and control, the architectural features of IMMACCS that are designed to support these operational requirements, the capabilities of the tools (i.e., agents) that IMMACCS offers its users, and the manner in which these tools can be applied. Finally, the performance of IMMACCS during the Urban Warrior Advanced Warfighting Experiment held in California in March, 1999, is discussed from an operational viewpoint

A \u3cem\u3e Translational Web Services Bridge \u3c/em\u3e Solution for Meaningful Interoperability Between Potentially Disparate Systems

An emerging issue in the world of context-centric software-based decision-support is the need for potentially disparate systems to interoperate in meaningful and useful ways. Such interoperability must go beyond the elementary communication of data and endeavor to support a more powerful context-oriented inter-system relationship. A key issue in such functionality is the support, moreover the promotion, of meaningful interoperability while still retaining individual system representations, or perspectives. In other words, the meaningful integration of potentially disparate systems in a manner that allows each collaborating system to retain its potentially unique means of representing, or perceiving, the domain over which it operates. In the past, several approaches to this problem have been postulated, such as development of a specific translator for each source/target system pair combination, development of a universal ontology to encompass both systems, and so on. Specific, one-off translators are usually tightly coupled with both systems and have limited support for dealing with representational changes. The alternate approach of developing a universal representation is not only highly impractical but also requires an ongoing effort of monumental proportions to achieve even a remotely acceptable solution. Considering the potential complexity inherent in mapping between possibly disparate perspectives it is the opinion of the authors that a suitable solution will require the employment of reasoning-enabling technologies capable of supporting the high level analysis involved in performing such context-based translation. Above and beyond the need for complex translation among differing perspectives, the authors see an additional critical ingredient in supporting meaningful interoperability among systems as being the application of a web services-oriented model of inter-system collaboration. In this paradigm, both formalized and more ad hoc system capabilities are essentially defined and exposed as accessible web services. Interoperability in this sense involves systems employing each other\u27s services in an effort to perform their desired tasks. Reliant on support for complex translation to map between perspectives, this notion of remote service invocation offers a simple yet effective metaphor for addressing the increasing need for useful interaction among potentially disparate systems. The focus of this paper is to provide both a vision and supporting design for a translation-based Web services interoperability bridge capable of supporting Web services-oriented interoperability among systems operating over potentially disparate representations. Capitalizing on offerings from both the artificial intelligence and semantic Web-based worlds the presented design incorporates technologies such as inference engines, rule-based systems, XML, XSLT, Web services and service-oriented architectures to provide the needed infrastructure to support meaningful interoperability among context-based systems in an information ag

The ICDM Development Toolkit: Technical Description

This report provides a technical description of the Integrated Cooperative Decision-Making (ICDM) software toolkit for the development of intelligent decision-support applications. An overview of the transformational forces that have precipitated the need for a development toolkit capable of supporting a distributed, information-centric software environment, and the objectives of ICDM are contained in a companion CDM Technical Report (CDM-16-04) entitled: “The ICDM Development Toolkit: Purpose and Overview”. ICDM is an application development framework and toolkit for distributed decision-support systems incorporating software agents that collaborate with each other and human users to monitor changes (i.e., events) in the state of problem situations, generate and evaluate alternative plans, and alert human users to immediate and developing resource shortages, failures, threats, and similar adverse conditions. A core component of any ICDM-based application is a virtual representation of the real world problem (i.e., decision-making) domain. This virtual representation takes the form of an internal information model, commonly referred to as an ontology. By providing context (i.e., data plus relationships) the ontology is able to support the automated reasoning capabilities of rule-based software agents. Principal objectives that are realized to varying degrees by the ICDM Toolkit include: support of an ontology-based, distributed, information-centric system environment that limits internal communications to changes in information; ability to automatically “push” changes in information to clients, based on individual subscription profiles that are changeable during execution; ability of clients to generate information queries in addition to their standing subscription-based requests; automatic management of object relationships (i.e., associations) during the creation, deletion and editing of objects; and, the ability to interface with external data sources through translators and ontological facades. Most importantly, the ICDM Toolkit is designed to support the machine generation of significant portions of both the server and client side code of an application. This is largely accomplished with tools that automatically build an application engine by integrating Toolkit components with the ontological properties derived from the internal information model. In this respect, an ICDM-based application consists of loosely coupled, generic services (e.g., subscription, query, persistence, agent engine), which in combination with the internal domain-specific information model are capable of satisfying the functional requirements of the application field. An ICDM-based software development process offers at least four distinct advantages over current data-centric software development practices. First, it provides a convenient structured transition to information-centric software applications and systems in which computer-based agents with reasoning capabilities assist human users to accelerate the tempo and increase the accuracy of decision-making activities. Second, ICDM allows software developers to automatically generate a significant portion of the code, leaving essentially only the domain-specific user-interface functions and individual agents to be designed and coded manually. Third, ICDM disciplines the software development process by shifting the focus from implementation to design, and by structuring the process into clearly defined stages. Each of these stages produces a set of verifiable artifacts, including a well defined and comprehensive documentation trail. Finally, ICDM provides a development platform for achieving interoperability by formalizing a common language and compatible representation across multiple applications within a distributed environment

The TIRAC™ Development Toolkit: Technical Description

This report provides a technical description of the Toolkit for Information Representation and Agent Collaboration (TIRAC™) software framework for the development of intelligent decision-support applications. An overview of the transformational forces that have precipitated the need for a development toolkit capable of supporting a distributed, information-centric software environment, and the objectives of TIRAC™ are contained in a companion CDM Technical Report (CDM-17-04) entitled: “The TIRAC™ Development Toolkit: Purpose and Overview.” TIRAC™ is an application development framework and toolkit for distributed decision-support systems incorporating software agents that collaborate with each other and human users to monitor changes (i.e., events) in the state of problem situations, generate, and evaluate alternative plans, and alert human users to immediate and developing resource shortages, failures, threats, and similar adverse conditions. A core component of any TIRAC-based application is a virtual representation of the real world problem (i.e., decision-making) domain. This virtual representation takes the form of an internal information model, commonly referred to as an ontology. By providing context (i.e., data plus relationships) the ontology is able to support the automated reasoning capabilities of rule-based software agents. Principal objectives that are realized to varying degrees by the TIRAC™ Toolkit include: support of an ontology-based, distributed, information-centric system environment that limits internal communications to changes in information; ability to automatically “push” changes in information to clients, based on individual subscription profiles that are changeable during execution; ability of clients to generate information queries in addition to their standing subscription-based requests; automatic management of object relationships (i.e., associations) during the creation, deletion, and editing of objects; and, the ability to interface with external data sources through translators and ontological facades. Most importantly, the TIRAC™ Toolkit is designed to support the machine generation of significant portions of both the server and client side code of an application. This is largely accomplished with tools that automatically build an application engine by integrating Toolkit components with the ontological properties derived from the internal information model. In this respect, a TIRAC-based application consists of loosely coupled, generic services (e.g., subscription, query, persistence, agent engine), which in combination with the internal domain-specific information model are capable of satisfying the functional requirements of the application field. A TIRAC-based software development process offers at least four distinct advantages over current data-centric software development practices. First, it provides a convenient structured transition to information-centric software applications and systems in which computer-based agents with reasoning capabilities assist human users to accelerate the tempo and increase the accuracy of decision-making activities. Second, TIRAC™ allows software developers to automatically generate a significant portion of the code, leaving essentially only the domain-specific user-interface functions and individual agents to be designed and coded manually. Third, TIRAC™ disciplines the software development process by shifting the focus from implementation to design, and by structuring the process into clearly defined stages. Each of these stages produces a set of verifiable artifacts, including a well defined and comprehensive documentation trail. Finally, TIRAC™ provides a development platform for achieving interoperability by formalizing a common language and compatible representation across multiple applications within a distributed environment

Effect of integrated yogic practices on positive and negative emotions in healthy adults

Background : Studies on affective wellbeing have shown the beneficial role of positive emotions on cognitive processing and the harmful role of negative emotions on coping, stress and health status. Studies have shown that yoga practices reduce anxiety and depression and improve wellbeing. Objective: The aims of the study were to, (i) examine the safety and feasibility of conducting a weeklong free yoga camp, and (ii) assess its impact on the negative and positive affect in normal healthy volunteers. Materials and Methods : In this open-arm study 450 participants were taught integrated yoga module. It included asanas, pranayama, relaxation, notional correction and devotional sessions. Assessment was carried out on the first and last day of the camp, using a modified version of Positive Affect Negative Affect Scale (PANAS). It has ten questions each to measure positive (PA) and negative affect (NA). Nine questions have been added which are referred as other positive affect (OPA) and other negative affect (ONA) domains. Results: Three hundred and twelve sets of pre-post data were analyzed. There was an increase in PA of PANAS by 13% (P<0.001, Wilcoxon′s signed rank test) and OPA by 17% (P<0.001). The NA reduced by 47% (P<0.001) and ONA by 48% (P<0.001). Conclusion: It is feasible and safe to conduct a weeklong yoga camp in an urban setting, and integrated yoga practices can reduce the negative affect and increase the positive affect within one week