Nils Carstengerdes

Towards a more secure ATC voice communications system

Contradictory to communication safety in the aviation field communication security has received relatively little attention to date, although the threats regarding air traffic security have been rapidly increasing in recent years. Within the project GAMMA (Global ATM Security Management) the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is developing a prototype to support air traffic controllers (ATCO) in detecting intrusions into the air ground voice system and therefore allow subsequent mitigating actions to be conducted.

Filtering joystick data for shooter design really matters

Designing satisfactory, quick and precise control schemes for shooters on consoles remains one of the major game play programming challenges today. Besides the application of game situation specific control aids like soft locking even simple and game unspecific filtering approaches can improve the control quality significantly. In this paper we will objectify and quantify this effect that is well known among game developers as heuristic knowledge.

Making Multi-team Systems More Adaptable by Enhancing Transactive Memory System Structures – The Case of CDM in APOC

The DLR project ‘Inter Team Collaboration’ (ITC) aims to provide systems engineers with tools and human factors concepts that allow a systemic access to the social side of socio-technical systems. A main design question for implementing Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) in APOC is how to induce collaborative decision making in a dynamic environment of ATM to make it more adaptive and resilient. Our main assumption is that the establishment of a Transactive-Memory System (TMS) is the basic predisposition for a successful implementation of intensive CDM. A TMS reflects linkages across MTS boundaries. Assumedly, its emergence is a function of social structures (like motives), but also of communication structures. The MTS is conceptualized as a nonlinear dynamical system (NDS), where CDM is conceived as an attractor to system-behavior. Recurrence analyses on behavioral data assessed within Human-in-the-Loop-experiments will be applied to identify MTS transition phases in reaction to perturbations.

A comprehensive approach for validation of air traffic management security prototypes: A case study

Security in air traffic management is still a rather new challenge and receives increased interest during recent years. This implies that new security concepts and systems are developed. Usually all systems have to go through several validation cycles to reach a higher technical readiness level. As no well-established validation approach is available which considers the special aspects of security this forms an additional barrier when developing air traffic control security systems. This is true because suitable validation approaches have to be developed first. The latter includes the risk of forgetting something, when the development is not initiated in a structured way. Within the air traffic security project GAMMA such an approach has been developed and applied to a set of seven prototypes. Based on the European Operational Concept Validation Methodology and a Security Risk Assessment Methodology, this approach identifies additional security controls, system requirements, validation objectives and key performance indicators. These are the driving elements for the design of the validation setup and procedure The paper demonstrates the feasibility of this new approach using one specific example, the Secure Air Traffic Control Communications prototype. The paper describes the approach and the resulting validation setup and procedures in detail. It briefly describes the obtained results for the developed prototype as one specific use case of the approach.