Over the past few years, global air traffic growth has exhibited a fairly stable positive trend, even through various circumstances. According to a prevailing opinion, this trend is unlikely to change in the future. Within this picture, traffic flow patterns will become more complex, making conflicts and situations harder to identify for human operators.
As envisaged by SESAR JU and HALA! Research Network, higher levels of automation will help Air Traffic Controllers (ATCos) to deal with increasingly complex airspace scenarios, enabling them to manage complexity in a safe and efficient way. Research has shown that supportive automation can be beneficial and lead to reduced workload, increased management capacity and performance reliability. However, the absence of automation errors can often not be guaranteed. Consequently, a human operator has to monitor the automation and to intervene in the unlikely event of system failure or the misinterpretation of the situation by the system.
It has been shown that the monitoring role of human operators results in negative effects, such as lack of attention, loss of Situation Awareness (SA) and skill degradation. It is expected that a monitoring task reduces ATCos’ ability to detect problems, determine the current state of the system, understand events and to react to situations. Therefore, adaptive automation should be taken into account to avoid keeping the ATCO ‘out-of-the-loop’ (OOTL). MINIMA pursued this goal by developing a vigilance and attention controller (VAC). Specially, MINIMA:
• Identified the frequency and the severity of the OOTL phenomenon in a highly automated terminal manoeuvring area (TMA). Based on a review of OTOL performance problems identified in the literature, MINIMA analysed which of these problems affect the performance of ATCoS.
• Analysed the task environment (TE), defined new task distributions and procedures and developed new attention guidance tools. New task distributions which decrease the level of automation and hand back tasks from the automation to the human operator may decrease system performance, but may be necessary to avoid OOTL problems. Also new tasks were defined in order to increase the operators’ vigilance. Attention guidance tools were arranged as well to highlight specific air traffic situations when necessary.
• Developed a real time “Vigilance and Attention Observer” to monitor the state of the human operator. This was based on cutting edge technologies, such as electroencephalography and eye trackers. Ad hoc indexes, combining multi-source information, compared the ATCo’s psychophysical state to a reference state. Applying a Brain-Computer-Interface to measure the operators’ state was a core aspect of MINIMA.
• Developed an adaptive automation based on the Vigilance and Attention Observer. Activation tasks and attention guidance tools were dynamically assigned based on the ACTo’s state measured with the vigilance and attention observer. As reducing the level of automation can reduce system performance, adaptive automation dynamically switched between modes of high and low automation to avoid OOTL occurrence.
In summary, MINIMA developed an automated system capable of providing substantial and verifiable capacity and efficiency benefits while fully addressing the risks associated with assigning a monitoring role to the human operator, such as dissatisfaction, lack of attention, loss of SA and de-skilling. This way, MINIMA provided guidance for the future design of fail-safe complex human-machine environments in the presence of high levels of automation.
