How Human Factors can act as enabler for safety, efficiency, eco-efficiency and AI

Kurzfassung

Increasing safety is and remains a pivotal point for the air traffic management sector. Of course, it is also and especially important to mitigate possible effects on capacity. Equally - if not more important - is getting to grips with the consequences of climate change. Needless to say, not only digitisation but also AI in particular are drivers of a special kind. How can human factors research make a difference in these areas? This presentation will present four examples of innovative work that highlight what can be achieved with Human Factors expertise. (1) Towards zero emission airports The German government has the goal, to transform the German economy into the world leading energy efficient one and strategically reduce energy consumption by 50%. The DLR aviation strategy takes main factors as digitisation and climate change into account and heads for an emission reduction aviation. Airports, with their high energy demand on air- and landside, have a significant potential to contribute to emission and energy reduction. The DLR project THOR (Towards Zero Emission Airports) will evaluate different ways and possibilities to achieve emission free and energy efficient airport operations, which is set as a goal by airports around the world by 2050. Several DLR institutes joined forces to bring together their knowledge in specialized areas of airport operations and energy systems to generate an overall view and build an environment to evaluate and validate future operations in terms of emissions and energy usage. The central goal for THOR is to generate a roadmap, describing promising technologies, processes and infrastructure, that are relevant to reach Zero Emission Airport Operations. Developed concepts and models will be evaluated, classified and summarized in terms of ecological, technical, operational, economic, political and societal aspects. The project will be the base for further research and development, that are required for deployment and implementation at airports. (2) Safety and efficiency by remote tower operations (RTO) In addition, current developments in the field of RTO and new possibilities for the future will also be presented. (3) Enabling teams to collaborate in a safe and efficient manner Furthermore, the collaboration of human operators from different organisations will be one factor enabling a performant air traffic today and in the future. Especially, good collaboration can contribute to the goal of a zero-emission air traffic by making operational processes more efficient. Within the DLR project Inter-Team-Collaboration (ITC), a team of human factors experts from different institutes investigated several methodological research questions regard analysis and evaluation of collaborative work processes. Concluding, the project derived guidelines, how collaborative work processes should be designed in order to enable human operators to collaborate in a safe and efficient manner, as well as being flexible and adapted to specific situations. Results from five empirical studies build the basis from which overarching influencing factors on collaboration and guidelines for the design of collaborative work processes were derived. These studies had a broad methodological rand and covered a range of different uses cases from air traffic, in which collaboration across organisational borders is necessary. (4) Recognising the limits of human performance in good time The results from the EU project Human Performance Envelope (from Future Sky Safety P6) are currently being used to find conclusions about the performance of pilots in the field of condition recognition using physiological measurements. Measurements of physiological parameters in DLR’s Flight Simulator AVES dedicated to measure stress and to analyse data through Deep Learning Applications will set the final tone in this report.