Securing future ATM-concepts' safety by measuring situation awareness in ATC

Abstract

A radical change in air traffic management (ATM) is required. New concepts implemented with a view to increasing capacity and efficiency should at least be safety-neutral. Because of the enormous impact of the introduction of new air traffic management systems, their basic concepts have to be evaluated prospectively. With the increasing automation during the nineties, the concept of situation awareness (SA) became accepted as a potential indicator for safety. Among the considerable number of methods that have been developed to measure SA, no method has been validated or applied to evaluate future ATM-concepts like the Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique (SAGAT). The approach of SAGAT is based on the assumption that the set of task environments' elements that are relevant for SA is independent of the dynamics within the task environment. Empirical evidence was found that this assumption can not be held in the ATC-domain. A new method to measure SA in ATC, called SALSA, has been developed. This measure takes into account that air traffic controllers use an event based mental representation of the air traffic. The SALSA and the SAGAT SA-measure have been compared in an evaluation study of a new ATM-concept. Results indicate that the method SALSA is feasible and more suitable than SAGAT to evaluate prospectively future ATM-concepts with regards to their impact on safety.