Objective
The aim is to develop a method with associated tools and techniques for engineering the design, development and evaluation of user interfaces for ATC systems. The method will be applicable to other safety critical systems.
The proposal is addressed to capture usability and safety user requirements for ATC applications and to show how it is possible to check their satisfaction at both formal specification and implementation levels. The proposal has three main objectives: A method which allows designers to develop ATC user interfaces specifications and related software implementations which satisfy usability and safety requirements. The method will be supported by a set of automatic tools which will allow designers to address large size, with industrial relevance, case studies. The development of ATC user interfaces prototypes which will be validated against usability and safety requirements by formal specification and empirical testing.
The Mefisto project will contribute to the design of user interfaces for safety critical interactive systems with special reference to Air Traffic Control (ATC) applications. With the predicted increases in volume of air traffic into the next millennia, software solutions to the problems of air traffic control workload are attractive.
Motivations:
Air traffic forecasts are normally based on passenger demand and economic factors, through the assumption that there is no limitation in the air traffic system itself, but it is obvious that there are constraints limiting the expansion of the number of flights. The number and the duration of delays, especially during peak hours (estimated to an annual 2 billion dollars cost) show that the ATC system and the airports are not always able to cope with the demand. This growing air traffic increases the possibility of accidents and requires more sophisticated techniques for its management. This type of application highlights the need of an approach which is able to support the design of user interfaces satisfying both usability and safety requirements. Approach:
The work programme for the project is organised into four main packages:
- Requirements and Scenario analysis and elicitation. In this phase the specific usability and safety requirements for air traffic control application will be identified in a integrated approach and precisely defined. To this end we have to take into account that we are considering a multi-users co-operative application as at the same time various pilots and controllers can be involved. We will develop an approach that links requirements gathering and analysis to formal specification.
- Formal specification and verification of user interfaces. Formal models of the dialogue between users and application, at different abstraction levels, will be built and analysed with the support of automatic tools in order to check properties, to evaluate performance and interaction design. We will investigate and assess means of checking that a model of the user interface satisfies given properties. Such checking will involve the use of software tools for model checking, and proof techniques.
- User Interface Prototyping. In this package we will address the issue of mapping the formal models of user interfaces onto software platforms as a fundamental part of the work programme in addition to the issue of prototype generation..
- Usability Evaluation. In this part we will address the issue of empirical evaluation of prototypes against requirements. A key problem addressed by this research will be to develop a range evaluation techniques appropriate for evaluating the ATC system prototypes generated by the project. Particular importance will be placed on techniques for validating usability and safety requirements of the sort generated in the first work package.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Coordinator
56127 PISA
Italy
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