Designing for shared cognition in air traffic management

Abstract

It is to be expected that the task of an air traffic controller will change with the introduction of 4D (space and time) trajectories for aircraft, as can be seen in ongoing developments in ATM systems in Europe (SESAR) and the US (NextGen). However, the role of the human operator in these systems in not well defined yet. This paper presents one approach to a user-centered design for ATM based on 4D trajectory management. The design is based on Cognitive Systems Engineering (Vicente, 1999). Using a top-down approach in the analysis of the work domain, a step-wise refinement in the planning and execution of 4D trajectories is proposed. The design is described in three Abstraction Hierarchies, one for each phase in the refinement. The implications of the analysis for display design are outlined.