Design and Evaluation Study of Visual Analytics Decision Support Tools in Air Traffic Control

Abstract

Operators in air traffic control facing time‐ and safety‐critical situations call for efficient, reliable and robust real‐time processing and interpretation of complex data. Automation support tools aid controllers in these processes to prevent separation losses between aircraft. Issues of current support tools include limited ‘what‐if’ and ‘what‐else’ probe functionalities in relation to vertical solutions. This work presents the design and evaluation of two visual analytics interfaces that promote contextual awareness and support ‘what‐if’ and ‘what‐else’ probes in the spatio‐temporal domain aiming to improve information integration and support controllers in prioritising conflict resolution. Both interfaces visualize vertical solution spaces against a time‐altitude graph. The main contributions of this paper are: (a) the presentation of two interfaces for supporting conflict solving; (b) the novel representation of how vertical information and aircraft rate of climb and descent affect conflicts and (c) an evaluation and comparison of the interfaces with a traditional air traffic control support system. The evaluation study was performed with domain experts to compare the effects of visualization concepts on operator engagement in processing solutions suggested by the tools. Results show that the visualizations support operators' ability to understand and resolve conflicts. Based on the results, general design guidelines for time‐critical domains are proposed.

Exploring Effects of Ecological Visual Analytics Interfaces on Experts' and Novices' Decision‐Making Processes: A Case Study in Air Traffic Control

“…Third, the finding that novices who did not resolve conflicts with the order of urgency on the control display, did follow the urgency order when working with ATL‐Viz indicates that ATL‐Viz encourages novices to resolve conflicts in relation to the urgency order. RAD‐Viz on the contrary did not improve conflict resolution prioritization neither for novices nor for experts [ZWLY22]. These two findings confirm that visualization of time on the angular axis of the polar graph (implying a clock metaphor) improves novices' ability to prioritize CD&R tasks based on urgency.…”

“…This section compares the dependent measures between expert AT‐Cos (obtained from the experiment conducted in our initial paper [ZWLY22]) and novices (as presented in Section 5). Comparisons were made between 20 novices and 7 ATCos in the ATL‐Viz group, and 18 novices and 7 ATCos in the RAD‐Viz group.…”

“…The incident usually occurs after an incorrect climb or descent clearance. In line with this, ATCos who participated in the study of [ZWLY20], requested a representation which provides insight about ROCD conflict criteria. To prioritize conflicts, temporal awareness regarding conflicts' urgency level should be increased.…”

“…In this paper, we conduct an expert‐novice comparison to investigate the extent to which ATL‐Viz and RAD‐Viz effects are attributed to the users' domain expertise. To achieve this, we first replicated the evaluation study we conducted in our previous paper [ZWLY22], this time on novice users and subsequently compared the results of the two experiments. The experiment consisted of three parts: (1) a training session, (2) Study I to assess participants' effectiveness in understanding the information, and (3) Study II where the participants worked with the VA interfaces.…”

“…To address the cognitive task limitation of ATC interfaces, in a previous study, we proposed two Visual Analytics (VA) interfaces [ZWLY22] especially designed for performing CD&R tasks in ATC and evaluated them through a user‐based experiment with domain experts. The proposed interfaces visualize occupied flight level (FL) and allow ATCos to analyze conflict situations in realtime on what‐if trajectories.…”