Visualizing complexities: the human limits of air traffic control

Abstract

Air traffic management is organized into filters in order to prevent tactical controllers from dealing with complex conflicting situations. In this article, we describe an experiment showing that a dynamic conflict display could improve human performance on complex conflict situations. Specifically, we designed a display tool that represents the conflicting portions of aircraft trajectories and the evolution of the conflict zone when the user adds a maneuver to an aircraft. The tool allows the user to dynamically check the potential conflicting zones with the computer mouse before making a maneuver decision. We tested its utility on a population of forty students: twenty Air Traffic Controller (ATC) students at the end of their initial training and twenty engineering students with the same background but no ATC training. They had to solve conflicts involving two to five aircraft with a basic display and with the dynamic visualization tool. Results show that in easy situations (2 aircraft), performance is similar with both displays. However, as the complexity of the situations grows (from 3 to 5 aircraft), the dynamic visualization tool enables users to solve the conflicts more efficiently. Using the tool leads to fewer unsolved conflicts and shorter delays. No significant differences are found between the two test groups except for delays: ATC students give maneuvers that generate less delays than engineering students. These results suggest that humans are better able to manage complex situations with the help of our conflict visualization tool.

Understanding and overcoming horizontal separation complexity in air traffic control: an expert/novice comparison

“…We checked how a tool capable of dynamically showing parts of potentially conflicting trajectories could help controllers separate aircraft for different levels of complexity. Durand et al (2018) showed in previous research using the CAT tool that the initial two year training of trainee ATCOs in France had a low impact on their capacity to manage complex situations. When comparing a group of trainee ATCOs with a group of engineering students who had the same age and scientific background without the ATC training experience, we did not see any significant difference except on delay management.…”

“…The conflict detection calculation was detailed by Durand et al (2018). Each trajectory is divided in line segments on which the aircraft has a constant speed.…”

Real-Time Visual Analytics Interfaces to Strengthen Human-Automation Collaboration

“…With respect to emergence of complex traffic patterns, visualization of air traffic complexity has been so far limited to post-analysis of historic data such as density maps of spatial data collected over several hours (Delahaye et al, 2004;Andrienko et al, 2018) and visualizing conflicting parts of trajectories (Durand et al, 2018). In this thesis, however, I propose visualization concepts which show information about emerging complex patterns in near future and present possible complexity-reduction solutions in real-time.…”

The Impact of Automation on Air Traffic Controller’s Behaviors

“…different components in the free trajectory space. It is suggested that any method requiring exploring every connected component is NP-difficult [37]. Moreover, the number of potential solutions in the solution space grows exponentially.…”