Develop a human-machine interaction-oriented commonality index for civil aircraft cockpit

Cockpit commonality is the key strategy of international main civil aircraft manufacturers. Most existing commonality indices are developed for product line from the component perspective, thus not suitable for assessing the commonality level of softwareintensive and interaction centred aircraft cockpit. Based on the concept-model-index paradigm, this paper develops an index to measure the level of cockpit commonality from the perspective of pilot-aircraft interaction. First, an interaction commonality model has been established based on the combination of human information processing model and the Commonality Constructional Element (CCE) concept. Then a hierarchical CCE set has been identified through analysing the cockpit design elements and features influencing the cognition process of pilots, together with expert interviews. On this basis, a scale for cockpit interaction commonality is developed. Finally, the interaction-oriented cockpit commonality index is constructed by aggregating the commonality scores of each ATA system according to their use frequencies. The Airbus aircraft family has been assessed in the case study to demonstrate the use and validity of the commonality index. The proposed commonality index in this paper can reflect the actual cockpit commonality level perceived by pilots, and support the commonality related cockpit design trade-offs and the design of Shorten Transition Courses.