Today we are on the brink of a groundbreaking evolution in aviation—one that embraces AI and digitalization. Big data and cloud computing have paved the way for the processing of massive historical datasets and these same datasets can now train AI algorithms to support air traffic controllers by identifying critical safety and performance scenarios and providing them with the necessary assistance to cope with increasing traffic maintaining or improving safety levels.
Guaranteeing optimal engagement of humans is of paramount importance. In order to do this, looking into the details of the main technologies that will support human-machine teaming. Some of these technologies include analysis of the “digital assistant tools” that could be provided to air traffic controllers. Digital assistants will provide recommendations and forecast to traffic evolution that will have to be evaluated and supervised by humans but will facilitate the management of complex traffic situations, anticipating potential conflicts, reducing their workload and increasing the safety of the ATC system as a whole.
In this context, we would like to invite you to this consultation exercise. We want to formally collect feedback from air traffic controllers on how assistants may help to do their work using new data-related technologies that could be introduced in the future. We want to be as open as possible in terms of scope and usability, but at the same time, we want to be very specific on recommendations and requirements, both from usability perspectives, but also expectations regarding target level of automation, reaction time, task overload of using an assistant, automation reliance, cooperation, automation surprise, among other concepts.
The consultation is divided in three parts:
Victor5 is not an Air Traffic Control system but an additional support system to the current ATC consoles. Victor5 can be used in a variety of scenarios, for example:
The current version displays real-time traffic information from a terrestrial ADS-B data feed but it is also compatible with other data sources, like radar or satellite ADS-B data sources.
Some of the Human-Machine Interface characteristics are:
The current version of Victor5 divides traffic in 3 groups:
We hope you find the HMI very easy to use. It has been designed by controllers for controllers. Now, feel free to play around with it and once you feel confortable, we would appreciate if you could help us answering a few questions related to digital assistants. Thank you for your cooperation.
You can take as much time as you need to evaluate Victor5. Once you have used Victor5 for at least some minutes and evaluated its functionalities, we ask you to fill out the following form, providing us feedback.