Safety and Workload Benefits of Automatic Speech Understanding for Radar Label Updates

Air traffic controllers (ATCos) quantified the benefits of automatic speech recognition and understanding (ASRU) on workload and flight safety. As a baseline procedure, ATCos manually enter all verbal clearances into the aircraft radar labels by mouse. In our proposed solution, ATCos are supported by ASRU, which is capable of delivering the required radar label updates automatically. ATCos need to visually review the ASRU-based label updates and only have to make corrections in case of misinterpretations. Overall, the amount of time required for manually inserting clearances, i.e., by selecting the correct input in the radar labels, was reduced from 12,700 s during 14 hours of simulation time down to 405 s when ATCos were supported by ASRU. Considering the additional time of mental workload for verifying ASRU output, there is still a saving of more than one-third of the time for radar label updates. This paper also considers safety aspects, i.e., how often incorrect inputs into aircraft radar labels occur with ASRU. The number of wrong or missing inputs is less than without ASRU support. This paper advances the use case that ASRU could potentially improve safety and efficiency for ATCo operations for arrivals.