Policy Capturing to Support Pilot Decision-Making

Abstract: Single-pilot operations are cognitively challenging for pilots and could benefit from decision-support tools to mitigate risk-prone situations. The Cognitive Shadow is a prototype tool that employs policy capturing, a data-driven technique used to model decisions, to learn users’ judgement policies and alert decision discrepancies from one’s decision pattern. This proof-of-concept study investigates the potential of policy capturing to model pilots’ policies facing unstable approaches. Pilots were presented simulated cases and asked whether to continue descent or to go-around while the policy-capturing tool learned their decision pattern and provided feedback. Individual models reached mean predictive accuracy of ~ 89% while the group model reached 100%. These results speak to the potential of extracting pilots’ knowledge using policy capturing to create decision aids.