A ROADMAP FOR TRANSFORMING TRADITIONAL ATCO TEAMS INTO COLLABORATIVE HUMAN-MACHINE TEAMS

Abstract

Europe's air transport sector is facing a number of challenges. Climate sustainability, rapidly growing demand combined with limited airspace capacity, a shortage of available aircraft and a lack of personnel for both ground handling service providers and air traffic control. As part of the Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research (SESAR) programme, various concepts are being analyzed in order to solve these problems in the coming years. One of these concepts is the Flight Centric Air Traffic Control (FCA) concept. The concept offers benefits in the field of climate sustainability, due to possible fuel savings in conflict-based trajectory changes, as well as an increase in airspace capacity while maintaining the same number of air traffic controllers due to a more even, workload-based distribution of aircraft among the total number of controllers. Alternatively, a constant volume of traffic can also be safely controlled with a reduced number of air traffic controllers, however, with the current conceptual approach there is no possibility of increasing capacity with a concurrent reduction in the total number of controllers. This is precisely what collaborative human-machine teaming is supposed to enable, whereby the conventional controller team will be replaced by a team consisting of a human controller and a machine controller. This paper is intended to present a roadmap on how the Flight Centric ATC concept can be further improved with the help of a collaborative human-machine team and be adapted to the needs of the European air transport sector