Karen M. Feigh

Design of Support Systems for Dynamic Decision Making in Airline Operations

To date, there has been very little research conducted on the design of support systems for dynamic decisions environments, such as airline operations. The paper discusses the idea that the regulation of dynamic systems has implications for both internal and external dynamic systems with respect to the human operator. Hollnagels contextual control modes are suggested as a framework for designing such support systems, noting that they can identify requirements specific to different contextual control modes

Statistical Determination of Vertical Resolution Requirements for Real-Time Wake-Vortex Prediction

2=s, the range of vortex Y-position RMS error is [0.7–134.5] m, and the range of vortex Z-position error is [1.2–10.1] m. The Y-position error had the largest variation with the maximum deviation exceeding 25 m. The second analysis sought to characterize the precision of the real-time wake-vortex model predictions as the resolution of the input meteorological files was reduced from 1 m to 100 m. Normalized RMS values (by 1 m resolution) were calculated for resolutions of 5, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, and 100 m averaged over the first 60 s of data available. For predicted circulation, differences were found between medians at input resolutions 5–20 m vs 25–100 m;for Y- andZ-position, differences were found between medians 100 m and all others.

Development and Evaluation of an Automated Path Planning Aid

M ODERN air transportation has an excellent flight safety record. When failures do occur in flight, owing to the training and experience of the pilots almost always results in a safe landing. This is evidenced by a rate of only 1.35 accidents per one million hours flown in 2007 by U.S. air carriers [1]. Despite this excellent record, the pilots’ responsibility to land safely in case of an emergency can be very demanding. When an emergency situation occurs during a flight, the pilots’ workload is very high and a number of tasks demand the pilots’ attention. One of the important tasks is the planning and execution of a trajectory resulting in a safe landing. However, this task is complicated by multiple, often conflicting goals, including reducing time to land, staying within the flight envelope limits of the airplane, weather issues, aswell asmeeting any relevant regulatory requirements. Moreover, all of these tasks must be accomplished in a stressful environment, often under severe time pressure [2]. Although fault-tolerant adaptive automation is currently being developed, for the foreseeable future of civil transport aviation, pilots will be the ultimate decision makers, especially in cases of emergencies involving any type of aircraft performance degradation or flight envelope reduction. As a result, current research is being directed at pilot aids that aim at enhancing the pilot’s situation awareness (SA), as well as at supporting the pilot’s decision-making process through the provision of relevant situation-related information. The purpose of this paper is to report on a human factors study related to efforts to develop an automated planning aid (APA) (in terms of both an acceptable interface and control algorithms) that could assist pilots in generating a plan to safely land at alternative landing sites. To do so, the pilots must first determine the “best” landing site and then formulate an expedient and safe trajectory to the ground. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of an APA interface prototype by means of a human-in-the-loop test with commercial airline pilots, focusing on the selection of alternate landing sites during an emergency. Although the implemented APA in the simulator was also able to compute emergency paths to those sites, a detailed description and discussion of this part of the process is omitted in this paper because it had no immediate effect on theAPA interface evaluation. The results of the study are evaluated in comparison to the opinion and judgment of a single subject matter expert. This expert had more than 20,000 h of flight experience in over 20 years of service as a commercial pilot. The authors do acknowledge that this comparison might be improved by incorporating more experts, more test cases, and a larger sample.However, given the fact that these scenarioswere designed in cooperation with that expert to have an unambiguous best solution, it is likely that, given enough time to review each scenario, the vast majority of trained pilots would come to the same conclusion as to which landing site was the best alternative. As such, the authors do believe that the metrics used, and the comparison with the experts ranking of the landing sites, is valid for the evaluation of the APA for selecting an alternate landing site under tight time constraints.

Structural Framework for Performance -Based Assessment of ATM Systems

Improving the total performance of th e air traffic management (ATM) system in terms of capacity, safety, efficiency, and flexibility require dramatic system -wide transformations as well as in the required performance levels for individual communication, navigation, and surveillance (CNS) syst ems . The evaluation of specific performance levels of ATM system requires a structural robust modeling and simulation framework that can evaluate emergent system -wide performance arising from the behavior of individual system components including human ope rators. This paper proposes an agent -based modeling and simulation framework including computational human performance models, built upon cognitive engineering principles, for a priori computational modeling and analysis method of predicting the required p erformance of potential grouping of innovative CNS technologies and applications proposed for Next Generation Air Transportation System (NEXTGEN) operations. A specific test case of analyzing aircraft arrivals into LAX using Continuous Descent Arrival (CDA ) concept will be examined as a demonstration. I. Introduction IR traffic demand has been steadily increasing for the past several decades, leading to airport and airspace congestion, with corresponding flight delays. Improving the performance of the air tr affic management (ATM) system in terms of capacity, safety, efficiency, and flexibility requires innovative transformations. These transformations will require dramatic changes in the required performance levels for technologies and applications, and for c ommunication, navigation, and surveillance (CNS) systems to cope with the growing demand of air traffic and to provide safe, consistent air traffic services (ATS). 1 The overall performance of ATM system depends not only upon the specific performance level of CNS systems, but also upon the performance of human operators who interact with the CNS system components. Therefore, the evaluation of specific levels of system performance requires an innovative structural framework that can evaluate overall emergent system performance arising from the behavior of individual system components including human operators. 2

A Task Decomposition Method for Function Allocation

to allocate functions and to evaluate that allocation based on current task decomposition methods. In this paper, a method for task decomposition for function allocation is introduced. The method in this paper, shows not only the hierarchical relationship between tasks, but also describes operating procedures, and conditions for the tasks within the method. Furthermore, it also provides a way to explicitly call out the induced tasks created by function allocation. To demonstrate the method, a case study of the Continuous Decent Arrival (CDA) procedure is analyzed.

Design of Support Systems for Cognitive Work in Airline Operations

Presented at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Aviation nTechnology, Integration and Operations Conference (ATIO).