Development and Validation of Objective Performance and Workload Measures in Air Traffic Control Technical rept

摘要

The current POWER suite of air traffic control (ATC) metrics includes such measures as traffic count, control duration, and variability in aircraft headings, altitudes, and speeds, as well as latencies of handoff initiation and acceptance, as well as records of a number of different controller activities. While these measures yield a reasonably detailed picture of events in a sector during the recording period, there is a substantial gap between them and measures of real interest, for example, measures of sector complexity and controller workload, situation awareness, and performance. Hence, although vast amounts of objective data are potentially available from operational ATC system, derivation of valid, reliable, and meaningful measures from them remains a problem. This problem is particularly pronounced when variables of interest are not directly measurable, such as controller workload and performance. This project represents an emphatically systematic and comprehensive approach to the measurement problem in ATC. The project involved many subtasks. The body of literature on ATC research was organized into taxonomy of ATC measures. Development of criteria for POWER measures was approached in the larger context of establishing and validating theoretical links between direct and indirect measures, facilitated by the measures taxonomy. Evaluation and validation of POWER measures was performed by analysis of data from three sectors at Indianapolis center (ZID). Development and validation of new measures involved an experiment using a part-task ATC simulation and POWER output from data from Kansas City center (ZKC) together with associated subjective workload measures.