Enabling Digital Air Traffic Controller Assistant through Human-Autonomy Teaming Design

Abstract

—The air traffic management domain has started to reap the benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support human controllers. However, the controller working position as the interface for managing air traffic is still limited to passively providing information, leaving the bulk of the tasks for human controllers, especially tasks involving decision-making. To meet the growing demands of air traffic, one way is to increase the level of automation in air traffic control systems. This requires a completely new task distribution for human controllers in combination with AI-based systems. Our paper will give an overview of our work related to the introduction of a digital Air Traffic Controller (ATCO) into an en-route controller working position. The digital ATCO is designed with the capabilities to perform several time-consuming tasks autonomously. The system is based on a meaningful distribution of tasks between a human and a digital ATCO. Several supporting tools and a Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT) interface are described, which are able to handle different modes of HAT operations. Lastly, we describe a proof of concept setup of the system integrated in a controller working position that was presented at the AIRSPACE WORLD 2023.