Please have a Look here: Successful Guidance of Air Traffic Controller's Attention

Abstract

Keeping the operator's attention on the right spot of the situation data display is one of the key factors to successfully guide air traffic. However, this becomes particularly difficult with complex and dense traffic situations displayed on larger screens. This paper describes our developed prototypic attention guidance (AG) system for air traffic controllers (ATCO). This system uses eye-tracking as an input of the ATCO's current attention. Different attention guidance was implemented for specific air traffic control (ATC) events such as handover and conflict alerts. Hereby, different visual cues are presented step-wise within various levels of escalation in case the ATCO did not pay attention to ATC events. The AG system was tested in human-in-the-loop validation trials with five ATCOs. The simulated Hungarian Flight-Centric airspace was chosen as a test-case. The validation trials revealed promising results for the Solution CWP with AG functionality. ATCOs reported less workload and improved situation awareness with the Solution CWP than with the Baseline CWP. In addition to that, increased acceptance and confidence with the Solution system were also reported. ATCOs felt strongly supported by our robust and smoothly interacting attention guidance system encouraging further development of our prototype towards operational use.