Towards full ATC automation for aircraft ground movement: A first step

Kurzfassung

Currently, there is already a shortage of air traffic controllers in some areas to adequately manage traffic. With rising demand in air traffic, this will likely further intensify in the next years. Increasing the level of automation of controller assistant tools could help mitigating this problem. However, higher automation harbors the risk of losing situational awareness and skills of the human operators. We present a prototypical system fully automating ground air traffic management and describe the technical details. Some features are presented that were added to the user interface to help air traffic controllers adapting to the changed workflow and reducing the loss of situational awareness. The prototype is able to run fully automatically in a predefined environment with a human supervisor. An outlook is given on human-in-the-loop trials with air traffic controllers that evaluate further steps on how to adapt the grade of automation to reduce risks of a loss of situational awareness and skills.