Abstract

International audience; The Air Traffic Control (ATC) environment is complex and safety-critical; operators work in dynamic situations and must make high-risk decisions under stress and temporal pressure. Whilst exchanging information with the aircrafts under their responsibility via radio, operators must also be alert to the occurrence of auditory alarms, such as the collision avoidance alert or danger area infringement warning. In addition, auditory warnings are increasingly integrated within ATC workstations. The high perceptual load involved in ATC means that controllers’ attention must be shared between several subtasks, with few or no remaining attentional capacity for processing information that is not related directly to the focal task. In this kind of situation, the likelihood of a controller failing to become aware of an auditory alarm, i.e. inattentional deafness, is high. Characterizing physiological symptoms associated with inattentional deafness would enable online detection of the phenomenon in safety-critical situations (nuclear power station supervision, piloting or air traffic control). We designed an ecological ATC thanks to the simulation environment called the “LABY” microworld. Twenty participants were required to guide one (low cognitive load) or two planes (high cognitive load) around a given route, while dealing with visual notifications relating to peripheral aircrafts. During the task, participants were played either standard tones which they were told to ignore, or deviant tones (“the alarm”, probability = 0.20) which they were told to report (20 alarms per scenario). We hypothesized that the detection rate of auditory alarms will decrease with cognitive workload. In order to explore this possibility, Behavioral results showed that 28.8% of alarms were not reported when guiding one plane, and up to 46.2% when guiding two planes (high load). The cognitive load increase led to a reduced visual notification detection rate, but the performance to guiding the central aircrafts was maintained, as well as the reaction times to report auditory alarms when perceived. This high rate of inattentional deafness is essential to further physiological studies on alarm omission in aeronautics, such as ERP or eye movement analysis. Potential applications are related to the integrative online detection and prevention of alarm omission, and the online measurement of workload in ecological situation.

Abstract

International audience; Collaboration is key to safety and efficiency in Air Traffic Control. Legacy paper-based systems enable seamless and non-verbal collaboration, but trends in new software and hardware for ATC tend to separate controllers more and more, which hinders collaboration. This paper presents a new interactive system designed to support collaboration in ATC. We ran a series of interviews and workshops to identify collaborative situations in ATC. From this analysis, we derived a set of requirements to support collaboration: support mutual awareness, communication and coordination, dynamic task allocation and simultaneous use with more than two people. We designed a set of new interactive tools to fulfill the requirements, by using a multi-user tabletop surface, appropriate feedthrough, and reified and partially-accomplishable actions. Preliminary evaluation shows that feedthrough is important, users benefit from a number of tools to communicate and coordinate their actions, and the tabletop is actually usable by three people both in tightly coupled tasks and parallel, individual activities. At a higher level, we also found that co-location is not enough to generate mutual awareness if users are not engaged in meaningful collaboration.

Abstract

International audience; Automation is one of the key solutions proposed and adopted by international Air Transport research programs to meet the challenges of increasing air traffic. For automation to be safe and usable, it needs to be suitable to the activity it supports, both when authoring it and when operating it. Here we present Vizir, a Domain-Specific Graphical Language and an Environment for authoring and operating airport automations. We used a participatory-design process with Air Traffic Controllers to gather requirements for Vizir and to design its features. Vizir combines visual interactionoriented programming constructs with activity-related geographic areas and events. Vizir offers explicit humancontrol constructs, graphical substrates and means to scaleup with multiple automations. We propose a set of guidelines to inspire designers of similar usable hybrid humanautomation system

Abstract

International audience; This SIG focuses on the engineering of automation in interactive critical systems. Automation has already been studied in a number of (sub-) disciplines and application fields: design, human factors, psychology, (software) engineering, aviation, health care, games. One distinguishing feature of the area we are focusing on is that in the field of interactive critical systems properties such as reliability, dependability, fault-tolerance are as important as usability, user experience or overall acceptance issues. The SIG targets at two problem areas: first the engineering of the user interaction with (partly-) autonomous systems: how to design, build and assess autonomous behavior, especially in cases where there is a need to represent on the user interface both autonomous and interactive objects. An example of such integration is the representation of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) (where no direct interaction is possible), together with aircrafts (that have to be instructed by an air traffic controller to avoid the UAV). Second the design and engineering of user interaction in general for autonomous objects/systems (for example a cruise control in a car or an autopilot in an aircraft).

Abstract

International audience; With the predicted growth of air traffic, traffic flow managers need new tools to access information to support their decision making processes. Recent progress with information visualization tools enables users to explore large data sets and extract decisive knowledge. Their advantages for air traffic applications are presented in this paper. They can provide high level information to aggregate trajectories. With constant feedback due to human perception, a flow model of the airspace, reflecting its intrinsic structure, is elaborated and can be used for further research.

Abstract

International audience; The present study aims at investigating the contribution of multimodal modalities to the context of Remote Towers. Interactive spatial sound and vibrotactile feedback were used to design 4 different types of interaction and feedback, responding to 4 typical Air Traffic Control use cases. The experiment involved 16 professional Air Traffic Controllers, who have been called to manage 4 different ATC scenarios into ecological experimental conditions. In two of the scenarios, participants had to control only one airport (i.e., Single Remote Tower context), while in the other two scenarios participants had to control simultaneously two airports (i.e., Multiple Remote Tower context). The augmentation modalities were activated or not in a balanced way. Behavioral results highlighted a significant increase in overall participants performance when the augmentation modalities were activated in Single Remote Tower context. This work demonstrates that some types of augmentation modalities can be used into Remote Tower context.

Abstract

International audience; In previous work, we have proposed a tool for Spatiotemporal Pattern Query. It matches individual moving object trajectories against a given movement pattern. For example, it can be used to find the situations of Missed Approach in ATC data (Air Traffic Control systems, used for tracking the movement of aircrafts), where the landing of the aircraft was interrupted for some reason. This tool expresses the pattern as a set of predicates that must be fulfilled in a certain temporal order. It is implemented as a Plugin to the Secondo DBMS system. Although the tool is generic and flexible, domain expertise is required to formulate and tune queries. The user has to decide the set of predicates, their arguments, and the temporal constraints that best describe the pattern. This paper demonstrates a novel solution where a Visual Analytics system, V-Analytics, is used in integration with this query tool to help a human analyst explore such patterns. The demonstration is based on a real ATC data set.

Abstract

International audience; In this paper we review the activities of Air Tra c Control and Management (ATC/M) and expose scenarios that illustrate current and future challenges in this domain. In particular we look at those challenges that can be tackled with the use of immersion. We introduce the concepts of an immersive Remote Tower and Collaborative Immersive Trajectory analysis. These make use of immersive technologies such as Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) or large, tiled displays to immerse users in their tasks, better supporting the management and analysis of the complex data produced in this domain

Abstract

International audience; When multiple modes of interaction are available, it is not obvious whether combining these technologies necessarily leads to a better user experience. It can be difficult to determine which modes are most appropriate for each interaction. However, complex activities such as air traffic control require multiple interaction techniques and modalities. As a result, in this paper, we study the technical challenges of adding finger detection to an augmented flight strip board used by air traffic controllers. We use our augmented strip board to evaluate interactions based on touch, digital pen and physical paper objects. From our user study, we find that users are able to quickly adapt to an interface that offers such a wide range of modalities. The availability of different modalities did not overburden the users and they did not find it difficult to determine the appropriate modality to use for each interaction.

Abstract

International audience; Modern embedded processors have gone through multiple internal optimization to speed-up the average execution time e.g., caches, pipelines, branch prediction. Besides, internal communication mechanisms and shared resources like caches or buses have a significant impact on Worst-Case Execution Times (WCETs). Having an accurate estimate of a WCET is now a challenge. Probabilistic approaches provide a viable alternative to single WCET estimation. They consider WCET as a probabilistic distribution associated to uncertainty or risk.In this paper, we present synthetic benchmarks and associated analysis for several LEON3 configurations on FPGA targets. Benchmarking exposes key parameters to execution time variability allowing for accurate probabilistic modeling of system dynamics. We analyze the impact of architecture-level configurations on average and worst-case behaviors.; Les processeurs embarqués modernes sont passés par optimisation interne multiple pour accélérer l'exécution moyenne par exemple le temps, les caches, les pipelines, la prédiction de branchement. Par ailleurs, mécanismes de communication et de partage des ressources comme des caches ou bus ont un impact significatif sur le temps d'exécution pire des cas (WCETs). Avoir une estimation précise d'un WCET est maintenant en défi. Les approches probabilistes fournies pour des alternatives viables à Singles WCET estimation. Ils considèrent comme un WCET probabiliste la distribution associée à l'incertitude ou le risque du pire cas.Dans cet article, nous présentons des benchmarks synthétiques et associés analyse pour plusieurs configurations LEON3 sur FPGA cibles. Benchmarking expose l'effet de certains paramètres sur la variabilité de l'exécution des taches afin de permettre à la modélisation probabiliste précise de la dynamique du système. Nous analysons l'impact des configurations sur les comportements moyens et pire cas du systeme.