HMIM: A Method to Study the Information and Control Flow Exchange in the Flight Deck

Abstract

According to cognitive process of operators, any undertaken task process could be decomposed into information flow and control flow. The amount of the flow reflects the difficulty of the task at any moment during the task process, and the change of the amount expresses the complexity of the task procedure. Human-machine interactive momentum (HMIM) was proposed in this paper to represent the exchange of information and control flow during the task process, and the related processing methods were also suggested to analyze the relationship between task and workload of individual operator. The manual approaching and landing process of a typical aircraft was used as a case study, and the results demonstrated a good correlation among HMIM, flight performance and workload variation. HMIM could be used as a human machine interaction analysis method.