Preliminary Findings on how to Mitigate Negative Impacts of Monitoring High Levels of Automation

Abstract

The MINIMA (Mitigating Negative Impacts of Monitoring high levels of Automation) project assumes that air traffic controllers in the future will have to operate in a highly automated environment through dedicated HMIs (Human Machine Interfaces). It is expected that such controllers will perform a role with significantly more monitoring portion than today. However, this raises the risk of a lack of involvement and OOTL (Out-Of-The-Loop) effects. Therefore, the MINIMA team has conceived a system to control and mitigate such OOTL effect. In order to demonstrate such concept an experimental simulation set-up has been designed. Such set-up comprises two parts: 1) a Task Environment comprising a TMA (Terminal Maneuvering Area) Simulator as well as 2) a Vigilance and Attention Controller based on neurophysiological data recording such as EEG and eye-tracking devices. By measuring the actual level of controllers’ attention while operating in a highly automated environment, adaptive automation systems are triggered in order to mitigate the negative effects of automation. This paper describes the system implemented to run the experiments needed to demonstrate and validate the MINIMA concept. Moreover, results coming from a preliminary set of tests that have been conducted in order to tune the Vigilance and Attention Controller are reported.