Supporting Air Traffic Controllers in handling sector specific tasks, enabled by the use of the Boundary Arrival Task Manager

Seamless airspace is a long-cherished goal targeted by Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) alongside other stakeholders. Since decades, airspace fragmentation has been identified as one of the main barriers for delivering more flexible and sector-independent Air Traffic Services (ATS) operations. It is also recognized to be one of the main causes of the Air Traffic Management (ATM) system’s inefficiency, especially from the economic point of view. To remedy this fragmentation and its negative impact, an increasing amount of possible solutions and ideas is being investigated to improve cost-effectiveness and productivity for ANSPs. Before making even more investment of additional funds, it is worth considering how to use existing technical and human resources more efficiently. Namely, the Air Traffic Controller (ATCO) staff, being one of the most valuable resources for ATM, might be shared between different Air Traffic Services Units (ATSUs) or even ANSPs in case of unexpected events (staff shortage, system outage, etc.). In today’s practice, each ATCO is endorsed only for a specific sector or group of sectors, and therefore, cannot be flexibly assigned to work on sectors other than the ones s/he is endorsed for. In addition, the previously mentioned fragmentation resulted in a huge number of sectors in Europe, which highly differs in terms of size, shape, and complexity. To evolve towards more efficient deployment of ATCO staff regardless of sector geographical specificity, an industrial research project PJ.33-W3-FALCO, "Flexible ATCO Endorsement and LDACS Complements", was launched within the context of SESAR. This project is investigating and identifying new solutions to increase flexibility of ATCO deployment by relaxing the obligation for ATCOs to be fully endorsed including a unit endorsement, and to compensate the expected loss of competence and working routine by procedural or technical means. The technical means are mainly new supporting tools, which provide direct assistance to the controller working on an unfamiliar sector. One of these tools is the so-called Boundary Arrival Task Manager (BATMAN). By sequencing the successive flights on a timeline, BATMAN shows remaining time values for tasks, such as level and speed changes or conflict resolution, that should be completed until the selected flight will be handed over to the next sector. This paper provides a description of the BATMAN tool and the idea behind its development. Besides, it briefly describes the simulation trials setup performed to test and evaluate this tool. Collected qualitative results are then analyzed. Qualitative assessment is based on gathered ATCOs feedback on their subjective feeling, tool’s operational feasibility, and possible further features enhancement. Lastly, this paper presents other possible uses of this tool beyond the current works and activities.