Intelligent Virtual Assistant System(IVAS) for Air Traffic Controllers

摘要

Air traffic control is an essential obligation in the aviation industry to have safe and efficient air transportation.Year by year,the workload and on-job-stress of the air traffic controllers are rapidly increasing due to the rapid growth of air traveling.Controllers are usually dealing with multiple aircrafts at a time and must make quick and accurate decisions to ensure the safety of aircrafts.Heavy workload and high responsibilities create air traffic control a stressful job that sometimes could be error-prone and time-consuming,since controlling and decision-making are solely dependent on human intelligence.To provide effective solutions for the mentioned on the job challenges of the controllers,this study proposed an intelligent virtual assistant system(IVAS)to assist the controllers thereby to reduce the controllers’workload.Consisting of four main parts,which are voice recognition,display conversation on screen,task execution,and text to speech,the proposed system is developed with the aid of artificial intelligence(AI)techniques to make speedy decisions and be free of human interventions.IVAS is a computer-based system that can be activated by the voice of the air traffic controller and then appropriately assist to control the flight.IVAS identifies the words spoken by the controller and then a virtual assistant navigates to collect the data requested from the controllers,which allows additional or free time to the controllers to contemplate more on the work or could assist to another aircraft.The Google speech application programming interface(API)converts audio to text to recognize keywords.AI agent is trained using the Hidden marko model(HMM)algorithm such that it could learn the characteristics of the distinct voices of the controllers.At this stage,the proposed IVAS can be used to provide training for novice air traffic controllers effectively.The system is to be developed as a real-time system which could be used at the air traffic controlling base for actual traffic controlling purposes and the system is to be further upgraded to perform the task by recognizing keywords directly from the pilot voice command.