MINIMA MItigating Negative Impacts of Monitoring High Levels of Automation

Abstract

The air traffic control domain is facing higher levels of automation. This will shift air traffic controller tasks to more monitoring and may cause negative impacts such as out-of-the-loop phenomena (OOTL) of controllers. MINIMA (Mitigating Negative Impacts of Monitoring high levels of Automation) will help to understand and mitigate OOTL phenomena of air traffic controllers in highly automated environments, particularly Terminal Manoeuvring Areas (TMA). With the use of e.g. electroencephalography, eye-tracking and other measures a level of vigilance and attention is computed. Adaptive automation, function allocation, additional tasks, or attention guidance in case attention is not where it is necessary will influence the controllers’ behaviour to ensure safe and secure ATC operations also during rare automation failures. MINIMA's objective is to improve comprehension of OOTL performance problems, particularly in future air traffic scenarios. In MINIMA, tools were developed to detect and compensate the negative impact of this phenomenon and a carefully selected distribution of tasks between the human agent and the automated system for the selected use case of a highly automated TMA. Specific Tools and a reasonable task distribution are required to profit from the advantages of higher levels of automation while coping with potential disadvantages. MINIMA developed a dynamic task allocation to keep the human in-the-loop, i. e. sufficiently aware of the traffic situation. Within the developed concept not all tasks, that could be automated, will be automated every time. A real-time monitoring system for operators’ vigilance was developed in MINIMA. This serves as base for the dynamic task distribution. Finally a new set of procedures was developed to cope with the new concept and, most importantly, with possible automation failures or the misinterpretation of the situation by the system. These fall-back procedures are required as higher levels of automation will go along with procedures that cannot be followed by operators without the support of automation even when they are kept in the loop.