Coordination in Multi-Actor Self-Separation in Complex Airspace Environments

Abstract

The Air Traffic Management research community expects that the responsibility of maintaining a minimum safe separation distance between aircraft will move from the groundbased Air Traffic Control, a centralized system, towards the flight deck, a decentralized system. Previous research on the decentralized, also known as distributed Air Traffic Management systems has shown promising results. However, aspects of coordination when more than two aircraft controlled by human operators are still to be explored. This paper presents an experimental research to study the coordination behavior of multiple actors using an ecological interface, known as the Solution Space Diagram (SSD), for the Conflict Detection & Resolution (CD&R) tasks. To judge the performance of humans, an automated conflict resolution algorithm, known as the Modified Voltage Potential (MVP), was used as the baseline.Several multi-aircraft scenarios were designed and simulated in a human-in-the-loop experiment. Results show that humans using the SSD display for the CD&R tasks operated safely for the designed scenarios. Compared to the resolutions of the MVP algorithm for the same scenarios, the humans depicted a safer and less efficient approach than the automated algorithm. For future research, attention was brought to aspects participant training in multi-actor experiments. The primary recommendation made was to explore the aspects of the efficiency of the human while using the SSD display by providing cues within the SSD.