Abstract
As airport resources are stretched to meet increasing demand for services, effective use of ground infrastructure is increasingly critical for ensuring operational efficiency. Work in operations research has produced algorithms providing airport tower controllers with guidance on optimal timings and sequences for flight arrivals, departures, and ground movement. While such decision support systems have the potential to improve operational efficiency, they may also affect users’ mental workload, situation awareness, and task performance. This work sought to identify performance outcomes and strategies employed by human decision makers during an experimental airport ground movement control task with the goal of identifying opportunities for enhancing user-centered tower control decision support systems. To address this challenge, thirty novice participants solved a set of vehicle routing problems presented in the format of a game representing the airport ground movement task practiced by runway controllers. The games varied across two independent variables, network map layout (representing task complexity) and gameplay objective (representing task flexibility), and verbal protocol, visual protocol, task performance, workload, and task duration were collected as dependent variables. A logistic regression analysis revealed that gameplay objective and task duration significantly affected the likelihood of a participant identifying the optimal solution to a game, with the likelihood of an optimal solution increasing with longer task duration and in the less flexible objective condition. In addition, workload appeared unaffected by either independent variable, but verbal protocols and visual observations indicated that high-performing participants demonstrated a greater degree of planning and situation awareness. Through identifying human behavior during optimization problem solving, the work of tower control can be better understood, which, in turn, provides insights for developing decision support systems for ground movement management.
Highlights
Predictions suggest that demand for the European airspace will grow by a factor of 1.5 between 2012 and 2035 (SESAR 2015)
While there is a considerable foundation of work focused on air traffic control relating to topics including, but not limited to, workload (Ahlstrom 2007; Corradini and Cacciari 2002), situation awareness (Edwards et al 2016; Friedrich et al 2018; van de Merwe et al 2012), and decision-making behavior (Corver and Grote 2016; Karikawa et al 2014), factors influencing performance and strategies employed by humans engaged in optimization problem solving are less understood (Kefalidou and Ormerod 2014)
A better understanding of such phenomena could lead to improvements in the user-centered design of decision support tools (Kefalidou 2017). We argue that this aspect of the role is not sufficiently understood, when applied to tower control operations, and as such, we sought to explore factors influencing human vehicle routing problem solving with an experimental approach
Summary
Predictions suggest that demand for the European airspace will grow by a factor of 1.5 between 2012 and 2035 (SESAR 2015). Bottlenecks at runways, taxiways, and other ground-based infrastructure can limit system performance, but decision support systems (DSS) that provide optimal scheduling and routing guidance may help to alleviate this (Karisch et al 2012). While there is a considerable foundation of work focused on air traffic control relating to topics including, but not limited to, workload (Ahlstrom 2007; Corradini and Cacciari 2002), situation awareness (Edwards et al 2016; Friedrich et al 2018; van de Merwe et al 2012), and decision-making behavior (Corver and Grote 2016; Karikawa et al 2014), factors influencing performance and strategies employed by humans engaged in optimization problem solving are less understood (Kefalidou and Ormerod 2014). This work seeks to enhance the body of knowledge related to human behavior and performance in vehicle routing optimization tasks as practiced in for tower control applications
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