Analysis of En-route Air Traffic Control Tasks from a Resilience Engineering Perspective

Abstract

Air Traffic Control Officers (ATCOs) routinely maintain safety and efficiency of air traffic operations by their resilient responses to unanticipated variations of a situation. Although resilience can be very essence of ATCO's skills, it is hard to analyze their resilience for improvement of training program of ATCO trainees because their resilience may be derived from their tacit practical knowledge. The present research has proposes an analysis method of processes of ATC tasks with using a cognitive system simulation toward visualizing resilience involved in ATCO's skills. Through simulation-based experiments, processes of ATC tasks in a complex traffic situation have been successfully analyzed. The basic effectiveness of the proposed method for analyses of resilience at the sharp-end of the air traffic control domain has been demonstrated through this attempt.