Monitoring Performance Measures for Radar Air Traffic Controllers Using Eye Tracking Techniques

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.

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“…Compared to other high-hazard industries, air traffic management is still human-centred [6]. This is why ATCOs are essential.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Suárez

Valdés

Moreno

et al. 2022

IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng.

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“…In this study, eye tracking metrics, namely, eye-fixation count (count of the number of fixations) and fixation duration (longer fixation duration indicates the longer processing time is needed to extract information), are chosen as dependent variables. These eye metrics are chosen as they are deemed to be suitable measures in capturing the monitoring behavior [3], [4], [11]. A fixation is computed from the eye data using the velocity threshold fixation identification (I-VT) algorithm [4], [11], [20].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…EEG analysis was performed offline in the MATLAB (ver-sion9. 3 II show the average, minimum, and maximum fixation count, fixation duration, and normalized EEG spectral power values of each participant during attentive and non-attentive when monitoring radar display. It can be seen that there are more fixation counts and longer fixation duration were registered during attentive monitoring activities as compared to non-attentive activities.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Real Time Neurophysiological Framework for General Monitoring Awareness of Air Traffic Controllers

Yuvaraj

Lye

Wee³

2020

2020 IEEE Asia-Pacific Conference on Computer Science and Data Engineering (CSDE)

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With the increasing traffic volume, air traffic controllers (ATCos) highly efficient performance plays an essential part in ensuring the safety and managing within limited manpower and resources. To ensure the performance, one way is to perform situation awareness (SA) examination. However, the known SA methods (such as text query) are either subjective or inapplicable in a practical scenario. Therefore, the use of physiological signals is becoming popular. In this work, a real time monitoring approach is proposed to assess a general monitoring awareness while looking at the events happening at the radar display during air traffic control (ATC), using neurophysiological measures taken from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals along with eye-tracking metrics such as eye fixation count and duration. Seven university engineering students participated in the attentive and non-attentive radar monitoring activities. The preliminary experimental results revealed that the real-time data of EEG, average fixation count, and fixation duration highlight distinct differences in levels between attentive and non-attentive monitoring activities (individual and collective). Also, the cognitive resource required for air traffic management (ATM) monitoring is relatively high. Such measures can be used as complementary data sets to gauge and validate an ATCos general SA.

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“…In reference to visual monitoring, within the literature, there are numerous references to experiments related to the human factor applied to controllers, where these techniques have been used (as an example, see Imants andde Greef, 2011 andWee et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Suárez

Valdés

Moreno

et al. 2022

AEAT

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Purpose Air traffic controllers (ATCOs) play a fundamental role in the safe, orderly and efficient management of air traffic. In the interests of improving safety, it would be beneficial to know what the workload thresholds are that permit ATCOs to carry out their functions safely and efficiently. The purpose of this paper is to present the development of a simulation platform to be able to validate an affective-cognitive performance methodology based on neurophysiological factors applied to ATCOs, to define the said thresholds. Design/methodology/approach The process followed in setting up the simulation platform is explained, with particular emphasis on the design of the program of exercises. The tools designed to obtain additional information on the actions of ATCOs and how their workload will be evaluated are also explained. Findings To establish the desired methodology, a series of exercises has been designed to be simulated. This paper describes the project development framework and validates it, taking preliminary results as a reference. The validation of the framework justifies further study to extend the preliminary results. Research limitations/implications This paper describes the first part of the project only, i.e. the definition of the problem and a proposed methodology to arrive at a workable solution. Further work will concentrate on carrying out a program of simulations and subsequent detailed analysis of the data obtained, based on the conclusions drawn from the preliminary results presented. Originality/value The methodology will be an important tool from the point of view of safety and the work carried out by ATCOs. This first phase is crucial as it provides a solid foundation for later stages.

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Monitoring Performance Measures for Radar Air Traffic Controllers Using Eye Tracking Techniques

Cited by 6 publications

References 19 publications

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

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

A Real Time Neurophysiological Framework for General Monitoring Awareness of Air Traffic Controllers

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

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