Exploring human-system resiliency in air traffic management technologies

In the safety-critical environment of air traffic control, increases in system efficiency in the form of cost, capacity, and safety are primary drivers for integrating automated decision support tools (DSTs) into the National Airspace System (NAS). However, increased use of automation brings new concerns, including the impact on operator situation awareness, over- or under-reliance on automation, and the ability of the system to recover to a suitable performance level when faced with degradation or off-nominal situations. Such effects may create a brittle system—one that performs well under normal conditions but poorly when faced with degraded or adverse situations. As automated tools become critical components in air traffic management, it will be necessary to have clear guidelines to aid the development of human-computer systems to protect against system brittleness. This work identifies key factors that contribute to human-system resiliency and proposes a series of relationships between these factors to provide a framework for guiding the development of system resiliency requirements in the context of air traffic management. The identification of such relationships will facilitate the development of guidance intended to help stakeholders proactively incorporate resiliency into human-automation systems that are being developed currently and in the future as part of the NextGen air traffic modernization effort.