Vital - an advanced time-based tool for the future 4D ATM environment

The number of aircrafts will increase in the future. It is commonly agreed that in several high density traffic areas like central Europe the capacity limits are nearly reached. A solution can be seen in 4-dimensional (4D - x, y, z-coordinates, time) air traffic management (ATM). As no revolution in ATC will take place, the close future 4D ATM system will be human centred. The human controller will still have to construct a mental picture of the air traffic for his own understanding. This mental picture is required for anticipating and predicting the movement of the aircrafts. The quality and speed of the construction of the mental picture depends largely how on the information is presented. Today, the presentation of the information is well adapted to the current working methods. A future 4D ATM system requires more complex information. Presenting this information with current methods, will increase the mental load for controllers to create their mental traffic picture. Further mental demand for the controller will either decrease his quality and/or his speed and therefore the working capacity. To overcome these constraints for a future 4D ATM the EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre (EEC) searched a new method to present this information to the en-route controller. Therefore information from radar and flight plans are correlated on the common time base and presented in a time-line. The concept, called 'Vital' represents the information in form of a table, the en-route MONitor (EMON). Each row of the EMON represents the artefact of an aircraft path related to the sector. The controller may place this artefact freely at any line of the EMON to support his mental representation of the sector. The innovation of this representation is the combination of digital and analogue information in the same artefact. The analogue information is presented on a time-line which is progressing in real-time. The size of the time-line window is common to all artefacts. The time-line information represents the past, actual and extrapolated future positions of an aircraft in the route network of the sector. The digital part of the artefact contains fix information from the flight plan and updated flight parameters. Future 4D concepts will include new features like route offsets, 4D rendezvous points, station keeping of two or more aircrafts, delayed or locally fixed climb/descend orders, including uncertainty. Furthermore displaying an envelope for possible speed variations are included in the analogue timeline representation without overloading the display and increasing the complexity significantly.