Operational knowledge acquisition problems for air traffic expert controller

Abstract

Air Traffic Control System (ATC) is a service of the Federal Aviation Administration to accomplish a safe and expeditious flow of the air traffic in the National Airspace System. To assist in AT controller training and to improve the future ATCS operation there is a need to design a computer program that would imitate the decision process of an experienced controller. Such a program, given a set of data describing a current traffic situation, would first analyze, recognize, and process the data to generate a set of facts constituting the bases for the controller's action. Then, using an available ATC operational knowledge base, the program would generate an appropriate controller action. We can differentiate two types of actions. The first type of actions reflect the final controller decision. The second type are actions initializing a request to acquire more data to solve the problem.