Impacts of Increasing Reliance on Automation in Air Traffic Control Systems

The next generation air transportation system (NextGen) will rely increasingly on automated tools in order to aid air traffic controllers in managing the increased volume of flights expected by 2025. Previous approaches for handling greater traffic are no longer scalable to handle the expected volumes. Roles and responsibilities will need to change for pilots and controllers. New automation tools will need to be invented. Rather than addressing the technology of the system of systems to transform the National Airspace System, this paper concentrates on system engineering specialties that will need to be employed in order to adequately address the safety impacts of radically increasing the reliance on automation. From a human factors perspective, the controller's job will change, requiring not only attention to computer-human interaction but also how attention spans are affected, ability to recover from automation errors or outages, the ability to be aware that an error or outage has occurred, changed working relationships with other members of the air traffic control and traffic management team, and situational awareness. Would the changes affect the safety culture? Existing trajectory projection algorithms may need to be improved, requiring analysis of new algorithms, modeling, and validation of the algorithms. Software implementing the algorithms will need to be rigorously verified. Depending on the level of traffic and complexity of algorithms, it may be necessary to use multi-core processors, thus requiring multithreaded algorithms. Safety risk management will need to consider the impacts of the automation on the humans, in addition to the usual identification of hazards in the end-to-end system. Mitigation needs to be identified early in order to be reflected in requirements documents. The paper examines the systems engineering processes that will need to be engaged across this system of systems in order to achieve the desired capacity increased while maintaining the necessary levels of safe operation.