Demonstration of Power: Performance and Objective Workload Evaluation Research

Abstract

The Federal Aviation Adrainistration (FAA) is developing a method to determine whether future air traffic control systems will provide the benefits to the National Airspace System (NAS) that were proposed when they were conceived. The purpose of this project was to develop a set of objective measures to characterize the productivity of an individual air traffic controller. Software was developed to compute measures of airspace characteristics, controller activities, and air traffic situational characteristics. This software, the Performance and Objective Workload Evaluation Research (POWER) program, computes a set of numerical measures based on routinely collected air traffic control data. The POWER program was written to interface with the Situation Assessment Through Re-creation of Incidents (SATORI) system, originally developed to re-create operational incidents (Rodgers & Duke, 1993). An engineering validation was conducted and a psychometric assessment is underway to evaluate the reliability, validity, and utility of the measures and a subset will be chosen to characterize controller taskload and performance. POWER will then be used to measure controller performance and taskload on ATC sectors to be transitioned to future systems. These baseline taskload and performance measures will be compared to taskload and performance measures obtained from future ATC systems after system implementation. POWER will also be used to evaluate alternative future systems display configurations at the Civil Aeromedical Institute (CAMI) Air Traffic Control Future Systems Simulation Laboratory.