Expertise Level, Control Strategies, and Robustness in Future Air Traffic Control Decision Aiding

The introduction of 4-D trajectory-based operations will require the development of new and more advanced “human-centered” decision support tools for future air traffic controllers. One approach to the design of human-centered decision aids is ecological interface design, which focuses on visualizing the boundaries of safe system performance rather than prescribing predetermined strategies or discrete solutions. Previous studies with ecological interfaces in the aviation domain revealed that humans sometimes opted for control actions close to these boundaries, giving rise to a general concern about the robustness of control actions. The goal of this study has been to empirically investigate how effectively an ecological interface for 4-D trajectory management, as developed in a previous study, supports the preservation of airspace robustness. For this purpose, a metric has been developed to evaluate both minimum and average sector-based and control-based robustness. Special attention was paid to quantifying and measuring the effect of expertise level on the robustness of human-generated control actions. Results of a human-in-the-loop experiment indicate that expert participants were most robust in their control actions, as compared with either skilled or novice participants. This result suggests that boundary-seeking control actions with ecological interfaces are mainly dependent on the level of expertise and the control strategies of the end user.