Evaluation of Alternative Waypoint and Flight Plan Conventions for NextGen En Route Operations

Abstract

This paper considers four alternative flight plan description conventions for use in the Next Generation Air Transportation (NextGen) program by airline dispatchers and compares each alternative against the current convention. The conventions included are: Fix and Route-based system (Fix/Route, i.e. the current convention), Geodetic Coordinates (GC), Navigation Reference System (NRS), Military Grid Reference System (MGRS), and Point Relation Navigation (PRN). Twenty-one airline dispatchers evaluated the conventions for ease of use, understanding, workload, and acceptability. The results identified the impact each convention had on participant performance, error commission, and user preference, on four tasks chosen to represent current dispatcher work practice. These tasks are more manual than those envisioned for future use, but would form the foundation for any fall-back operation. The study found that the existing Fix/Route convention had the best performance and lowest error rate and severity on the majority of tasks. Of the alternative conventions tested, the PRN and NRS conventions had similar performance to the Fix/Route convention, whereas the GC and MGRS conventions performed poorly compared with the Fix/Route convention. The dispatchers preferred the PRN convention to the other alternative conventions evaluated. The results of this study suggest that a successful replacement convention should use relative instead of absolute location specification; make use of some characteristics of the current airspace structure, such as the boundaries of the ARTCCs; and keep waypoint descriptors short or format them so that they can be combined into a single chunk in memory, which possibly can be associated with geographic meaning.