Abstract
Increasing the level of automation in air traffic management is seen as a measure to increase the performance of the service to satisfy the predicted future demand. This is expected to result in new roles for the human operator: he will mainly monitor highly automated systems and seldom intervene. Therefore, air traffic controllers (ATCos) would often work in a supervisory or control mode rather than in a direct operating mode. However, it has been demonstrated how human operators in such a role are affected by human performance issues, known as Out-Of-The-Loop (OOTL) phenomenon, consisting in lack of attention, loss of situational awareness and de-skilling. A countermeasure to this phenomenon has been identified in the adaptive automation (AA), i.e., a system able to allocate the operative tasks to the machine or to the operator depending on their needs. In this context, psychophysiological measures have been highlighted as powerful tool to provide a reliable, unobtrusive and real-time assessment of the ATCo’s mental state to be used as control logic for AA-based systems. In this paper, it is presented the so-called “Vigilance and Attention Controller”, a system based on electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking (ET) techniques, aimed to assess in real time the vigilance level of an ATCo dealing with a highly automated human–machine interface and to use this measure to adapt the level of automation of the interface itself. The system has been tested on 14 professional ATCos performing two highly realistic scenarios, one with the system disabled and one with the system enabled. The results confirmed that (i) long high automated tasks induce vigilance decreasing and OOTL-related phenomena; (ii) EEG measures are sensitive to these kinds of mental impairments; and (iii) AA was able to counteract this negative effect by keeping the ATCo more involved within the operative task. The results were confirmed by EEG and ET measures as well as by performance and subjective ones, providing a clear example of potential applications and related benefits of AA.
Highlights
Over the last decade, the global air traffic growth has exhibited a fairly stable positive trend, despite economic immobility, financial crisis, and increased security concerns
The interface automation level can be lowered through proper external triggers, in this case provided by the Vigilance and Attention Controller” (VAC)
The concept of AA, i.e., a system able to allocate operative tasks to the machine or to the human operator depending on the situation and the operator status, has been pointed out as the final solution to mitigate those human factor issues related to high automation, generally summarized with the term “OOTL phenomenon” (Endsley, 1995; Parasuraman et al, 1996)
Summary
The global air traffic growth has exhibited a fairly stable positive trend, despite economic immobility, financial crisis, and increased security concerns. According to the most recent annual global statistics provided by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO, n.d.), the total number of passengers carried grew to 4.1 billion in 2017, 7.2% higher than the previous year, while the number of departures reached 36.7 million in 2017, a 3.1% increase compared to 2016. According to the latest ICAO long-term air traffic forecasts, the 4.1 billion airline passengers carried in 2017 are expected to grow to about 10.0 billion by 2040, and the number of departures is projected to rise to some 90 million in 2040. It is clear that air traffic flow patterns will become more complex, making situations and conflicts harder to identify for a human operator, putting immense pressure on the air traffic control system (Hopkin, 2017). All of them had the same common denominator: the automation (Hilburn et al, 1998)
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