How much workload is workload? A human neurophysiological and affective - cognitive performance measurement methodology for air traffic controllers

Abstract

Air traffic controllers play an important role in enabling safe, orderly, and efficient flight management within airspace. By the very nature of their work, they must make critical decisions in a time-critical environment. From a safety point of view, it would be of interest to obtain the workload thresholds (upper and lower limits) in order to define a range in which it would be safe and efficient for air traffic controllers to work. This collaboration project between CRIDA and UPM aims to obtain a methodology to define these workload limits, based on experimental affective-cognitive data and neurophysiological parameters of the performance of air traffic controllers. The workload assessment combines objective and subjective approaches. From the objective point of view, electroencephalography and eye-tracking techniques will be employed. In this paper, the first milestones achieved in the project are presented, as well as the simulation platform to be used in the experiment and the simulation-based set of exercises that has been specially designed for this project.