Ecological Interface Design and its Application to Total Airport Management

Abstract

The concept of Total Airport Management aims at harmonizing and optimizing the processes at an airport. For this purpose and to guarantee the acceptance of the airport operation plan from all stakeholders, it has been proposed to develop a control room in which stakeholders negotiate a quality of service contract and airport processes. This control room will, amongst others, be equipped with a large videowall, which should enable stakeholders yielding sound situation awareness. The paper at hand introduces an information representation for this videowall, which should support knowledge-based behaviour, and, thus, applies the Ecological Interface Design Guidelines. Therefor, it discusses how the Total Airport Management system’s functional purpose, abstract functions, generalized functions, physical processes, and physical form can be presented appropriately on the videowall. Herewith, this paper generalizes the Ecological Interface Design approach to airport management and provides a theory-based proposition of the videowall’s design.