Abstract

Day-to-day air traffic is exposed to a large number of influencing factors, which are steadily changing and causing significant volatility. Examples would be the daily weather situation, charter flights, flight cancellations, changes in airspace configuration, or the temporary non-availability of supporting infrastructure such as navigation aids, runways, or taxiways. When conducting validation activities with live air traffic, as it is currently done in SESARs xStream project, this circumstance complicates meaningful performance measurements. Especially when the volatility of the air traffic under consideration is within the same magnitude than the expected benefit of the system under test, the positive effects may be invisible similar to a poor signal-to-noise ratio. In order to statistically determine a small effect, one must either evaluate a very large data basis or, if this is not possible, find and eliminate disturbances before the actual evaluation. Within the xStream project, a methodology has been developed to do this elimination in a reasonable and systematic way and filter out those datasets that, because of a totally different weather situation, traffic mix etc., make a meaningful baseline-solution comparison impossible. This is done by performing multiple systematic pair-wise comparability checks between dedicated reference and exercise data sets. Beside others, these checks cover local and area weather conditions, airspace and air traffic control service configurations as well as the current traffic constellation. Based on the methodology, algorithms were developed by the Institute of Flight Guidance of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Braunschweig and have been implemented in several in-house software modules, allowing the conduction of these checks in an almost fully automatic way. This software has then been tested with several different air traffic recordings from a European hub airport by calculating selected performance metrics. Obtained results were then compared with performance measurements without previous comparability checks. The results show that the developed methodology was able to compensate approximately 60% of the air traffic volatility of the used radar tracks when reducing the sample size to one quarter containing the best comparable datasets. This paper provides comprehensive information about the developed comparability checks itself and describes the observed effects, compared to unfiltered performance measurements. It closes with a discussion and an outlook with special regard to the upcoming application of this methodology in the xStream project.

Abstract

The awareness about security threats and vulnerabilities in Air Traffic Management (ATM) has been steadily growing over the last years. The number of recent security research projects shows that the effort taken to close these vulnerabilities and to make air traffic more robust against security attacks is increasing in the same way. As Air Traffic Management is often done across national borders, related security incidents could affect several air navigation service providers and stakeholders in different nations at the same time. A quick and efficient exchange of security-relevant information as well as a multi-national level of security management is needed. In the frame of the Global ATM Security Management Project (GAMMA), several prototypic security systems were developed and designed as part of a European security management system architecture. This concept foresees a local, a national and a European level of security management while essential information is shared between those levels. In order to validate this approach, several real-time humanin-the-loop simulations were conducted in the first half of 2017. Both, the connected security systems and also the validation environment were set up in a geo-distributed way across Europe integrating different components from several project partners. During these trials, special attention was payed to information exchange and transmission times, the performance of automatic correlation as well as the role of human operators embedded in this system of systems. The trials showed that – even in a geo-distributed setup – information can be exchanged and countermeasures can be initiated in less than 2 minutes through the different levels of security management. This paper provides information about the experimental setup and conduction of the GAMMA project’s third geo-distributed validation exercise. It illustrates selected results as well as provides a discussion and an outlook.

Abstract

utomatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has recently proved to be a useful tool to reduce the workload of air traffic controllers leading to significant gains in operational efficiency. Air Traffic Control (ATC) systems in operation rooms around the world generate large amounts of untranscribed speech and radar data each day, which can be utilized to build and improve ASR models. In this paper, we propose an iterative approach that utilizes increasing amounts of untranscribed data to incrementally build the necessary ASR models for an ATC operational area. Our approach uses a semi-supervised learning framework to combine speech and radar data to iteratively update the acoustic model, language model and command prediction model (i.e. prediction of possible commands from radar data for a given air traffic situation) of an ASR system. Starting with seed models built with a limited amount of manually transcribed data, we simulate an operational scenario to adapt and improve the models through semi-supervised learning. Experiments on two independent ATC areas (Vienna and Prague) demonstrate the utility of our proposed methodology that can scale to operational environments with minimal manual effort for learning and adaptation.

Abstract

Cargo airlines and other aircraft operating agencies are interested in commercially exploiting and benefiting from the technical possibilities provided by unmanned aircraft systems. Use cases could be long-range unmanned air transport, flight calibration, or surveillance missions. It is natural that, depending on weight and size, unmanned aircraft are going to use the existing ground infrastructure together with manned aircraft. But it is also a well-known fact that remotely piloted or automatic / autonomous unmanned aircraft do not have the same abilities and behavior than manned aircraft. A way has to be elaborated to achieve a safe, orderly and expeditious flow of a mixed traffic constellation even when more than one unmanned aircraft are involved in aerodrome operations at the same time. Unfortunately, due to a lack of international standardization and regulation, it is still unknown which abilities a commercial unmanned aircraft will have. This makes it very difficult to define operational procedures already. In the frame of the SESAR 2020 project ‘Surface Management Operations’ (SuMO), a procedural concept for ground movements of unmanned aircraft together with manned aircraft was elaborated. This concept uses so called segmented standard taxi routes and aims at realizing mixed traffic with an equal level of safety compared to pure manned traffic as well as very low system requirements for unmanned aircraft systems. In November 2017 this concept was validated together with Tower Controllers, Conventional Pilots, Remotely Piloted Aircraft Operators and an air traffic management expert from the German Air Navigation Service Provider DFS in a gaming workshop over several days; covering departures, arrivals and non-nominal situations like C2 link loss or lost communication. Results showed that this concept likely allows a first and easy integration of unmanned aircraft systems and it was rated as very practical and realistic. This paper gives basic information about the procedure of segmented standard taxi routes, briefly describes the used validation methodology and illustrates first results, closing with a short discussion and an outlook.

Abstract

TriControl is a controller working position (CWP) prototype developed by German Aerospace Center (DLR) to enable more natural, efficient, and faster command inputs. The prototype integrates three input modalities: speech recognition, eye tracking, and multi-touch sensing. Air traffic controllers may use all three modalities simultaneously to build commands that will be forwarded to the pilot and to the air traffic management (ATM) system. This paper evaluates possible speed improvements of TriControl compared to conventional systems involving voice transmission and manual data entry. 26 air traffic controllers participated in one of two air traffic control simulation sub-studies, one with each input system. Results show potential of a 15% speed gain for multimodal controller command input in contrast to conventional inputs. Thus, the use and combination of modern human machine interface (HMI) technologies at the CWP can increase controller productivity. Document type: Article

Abstract

International audience; Increasing the level of automation in air traffic management is seen as a measure to increase the performance of the service to satisfy the predicted future demand. This is expected to result in new roles for the human operator: he will mainly monitor highly automated systems and seldom intervene. Therefore, air traffic controllers (ATCos) would often work in a supervisory or control mode rather than in a direct operating mode. However, it has been demonstrated how human operators in such a role are affected by human performance issues, known as Out-Of-The-Loop (OOTL) phenomenon, consisting in lack of attention, loss of situational awareness and de-skilling. A countermeasure to this phenomenon has been identified in the adaptive automation (AA), i.e., a system able to allocate the operative tasks to the machine or to the operator depending on their needs. In this context, psychophysiological measures have been highlighted as powerful tool to provide a reliable, unobtrusive and real-time assessment of the ATCo’s mental state to be used as control logic for AA-based systems. In this paper, it is presented the so-called “Vigilance and Attention Controller”, a system based on electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking (ET) techniques, aimed to assess in real time the vigilance level of an ATCo dealing with a highly automated human–machine interface and to use this measure to adapt the level of automation of the interface itself. The system has been tested on 14 professional ATCos performing two highly realistic scenarios, one with the system disabled and one with the system enabled. The results confirmed that (i) long high automated tasks induce vigilance decreasing and OOTL-related phenomena; (ii) EEG measures are sensitive to these kinds of mental impairments; and (iii) AA was able to counteract this negative effect by keeping the ATCo more involved within the operative task. The results were confirmed by EEG and ET measures as well as by performance and subjective ones, providing a clear example of potential applications and related benefits of AA. Document type: Article

Abstract

Since years it is known that radio communication used by ATC can easily be intruded and is therefore subject to recurrent attacks. Nevertheless the voice communication between pilots and controllers is still the most flexible and efficient medium especially in a busy traffic environment, in non-standard situations or simply when exchanging air-ground messages in plain language is needed. As vulnerability seems not dominant compared to the number of crucial damages, voice communication is still the basic and most important communication method within the aeronautical mobile service. This motivated the development of a prototype for secure ATC communications (SACom) within the frame of the Global ATM Security Management Project (GAMMA). The challenge when designing a security management prototype for ATM is not only to find out if the concept is appropriate to minimize the expected impact of possible attacks. In fact the benefit for the participating stakeholders has to be evaluated and proven by appropriate evidence. The need for evidence leads to the understanding that there is a clear lack existing between the theoretically defined outlines by NextGen and SESAR and the measures at hand to validate prototypes in the area of ATM security. The document highlights the approach to validate the proposed system to secure ATC communication. Therefore the paper describes the intended prototype to secure ATC voice communication and the different modules it consists of. Moreover the surrounding validation environment and the dedicated validation platform for investigating the prototype is elaborated and described in detail. To achieve this, reader’s mindset will be sharpened for the idea of validation platform subsets and validation environment building blocks Within the project the prototype for secure ATC communication has been designed and developed. The verification of the prototype has been conducted in the Air Traffic Management Validation Center of the DLR in 2015/2016, whereas the first validation exercises were conducted in late spring of 2016. During the exercises the benefit of each single module as the benefit of the correlated value of all indicators will be validated. The prototype is not only been verified and validated as a single system. Moreover, during the preparatory work for the validation exercises a small scale experimental setup was used together with partners in the project in order to elaborate added value of the presented prototype already as a pre-production sample. The results obtained already demonstrate the general feasibility of the developed prototype. A detailed discussion of the preliminary validation results will be done in the full paper. This research-in-progress paper presents the initial findings from the validation and initial implementation of the security management prototype for secure ATC communications. The recent work supports the current security engineering needs and offers an iteratively deployable capability to complement the current ATM/CNS system and future deployment activities under SESAR or NextGen. The applied approach for the validation of this single prototype provides a mature basis for setting up a distinct methodology for validation of other ATM security oriented systems.