Usability evaluation of the cockpit display system

Abstract

The cockpit display system is the most important source for the pilot to obtain information, so its usability has a great significance. However, the relevant research is very rare and inappropriate for the moment. Therefore, in order to improve the cockpit display system, this paper proposes five evaluation factors and a series of evaluation indicators, and build a set of evaluation method. Firstly, this paper adopt Analytic Hierarchy Process to confirm the weight of each factor and its indicators. Secondly, this paper adopt expert scoring method to obtain all indicators’ usability score. Finally, this paper integrates the usability score and corresponding weight of every indicator to give a overall usability score of the cockpit display system. Besides, using the above method, we invite five graduate students to make a cockpit simulator display system’s usability evaluation, the evaluation result is between good and very good, demonstrating that the method of this paper indeed can make a quantitative evaluation for the usability of cockpit display system. Fortunately, this will be the first time in the history of the whole cockpit display system’s usability evaluation, undoubtedly, it will also accelerate the development of the whole cockpit display system’s usability rapidly. Similarly, we can also generalize this method to the whole cockpit or even the whole aircraft’s usability evaluation.