"AUTOPACE has defined a Concept of Operation and future Automation Scenarios in nominal and non-nominal situations identifying new roles and responsibilities for ATCo with the system-human function allocation foreseen at 2050 time horizon. Due to the level of uncertainty on how automatic systems will be in 2050, two different levels of automation are described (Medium and High Automation) with different roles and responsibilities for ATCo.
A research on an ATCo Psychological Model based on established attentional theories to predict the effects of automation on the ATCo performance has been done. Particularly: (a) an estimation on how the ATCo cognitive system structure changes with automation as the future ATCo shall focus his/her cognitive effort on mainly comprehension and projection processes for situational awareness acquisition (monitoring and supervision); (b) the identification of the ATCo performance drawbacks due to the risk of the “out of the loop (OOTL)” and “fear of automation” whose consequences are especially severe in case of automation failure; and (c) hypotheses collecting how the ATCo performance in terms of Mental Workload will be affected by automation along with a preliminary experimental plan to validate them in future research.
Besides, the identification of new ATCo Competences and a Training Strategies catalogue is defined addressing not only the technical system interaction needs but also the psychological (cognitive and non-cognitive) aspects to mitigate the ATCo performance drawbacks due to automation. This research has also provided a feasibility study on a validation platform to emulate future ATCo and system responsibilities to be used for further validation and some conclusions on selection criteria along with prerequisites on Skills, Abilities and Personality Characteristics for future ATCos.
A Preliminary Safety Hazard Assessment (PHA) in future automation Scenarios for nominal and non-nominal situations has been done to provide a set of automation risks that should be mitigated by modifying ATCo training or refining the system and procedure design. Based on this analysis, training strategies have been refined to mitigate those related hazards. Recommendations on system features and operational procedures for high automation environments to address those risks not covered or mitigated with ATCo future competences and training are also defined.
Finally a Qualitative Performance Assessment (CAP, CEFF, HP) has shown the benefits brought by AUTOPACE concept elements.
AUTOPACE Project was presented at UPM Summer Course 2016 ""ADDRESSING AVIATION AND ATM SAFETY CHALLENGES” (July 2016); in SESAR Innovation Days at Delft (November 2016), in the South East Aviation Summit - SEAS (December 2016),the World ATM Congress (March 2017), FRAMily workshop (May 2017), SAFE 2017 (September 2017), SYMOPIS 2017 (September 2017), 7th EASN International Conference (September 2017), 7th SESAR Innovation Days (November 2017) and TRB 2018 (January 2018). Two workshops (March, 2017 at Madrid and November, 2017 at Belgrade) and one Final Dissemination Event (March 2018 at Madrid) have been organised.
A poster, papers and articles (11 in total) have been prepared and submitted during the project life.
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