AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

The concept of Trajectory Based Operations as proposed by the SESAR and NextGen projects seeks to enhance efficiency and increase airspace capacity by the explicit use of time as the control variable. Nevertheless, the Air Traffic Control system has too many unforeseen events to make it entirely automatic, and adequate decision-support tools will be required to support the human Air Traffic Controller with control operations. In previous research, following the Ecological Interface Design paradigm, one such constrain-based decision support tool was developed. A human-in-the-loop experiment showed that system’s Robustness could be affected if control choices were not taken adequately. The goal of this study has been to integrate the observed attributes of expert control into a graphical representation in order to enable novices to perform better rule-based shortcuts which ensures the long-term stability of the system. For this purpose, the elements taken into consideration by expert operators during decision-making processes were analyzed. As a result, three different types of abstractions have been identified which influence the operator’s cognitive activities. A metric for the evaluation of robustness has been adapted and its graphical representation integrated in a prototype in order to promote control behavior changes in novices controllers. A future experiment is foreseen in order to validate the design presented here and to evaluate its effectiveness.