MEFISTO Deliverable 1

All partners
Concepts and requirements Analysis

• Deliv1/1 presents an overview of the structure of Deliverable 1;
• Deliv1/2 presents the safety aspects of ATC and gives an overview of existing approaches and techniques that we plan to extend and apply for the design of interactive safety-critical ATC systems; this part of work has been developed in task 1.1 of the project (data gathering);
• Deliv 1/3 presents the different ATC case studies that we are considering in the project; this part of work has been developed in task 1.1 of the project (data gathering);
• Deliv 1/4 describes the first applications of the methods introduced in the document deliv 1/2 to the case studies detailed in the document deliv1/3; this part of work has been developed in task 1.2 of the project (requirement analysis).

Deliv 1/1: overview of Deliverable 1

The Deliv 1/1 is part of deliverable 1 and presents a brief overview of the three other documents composing the so-called deliverable1

Deliv 1/2: background and descriptions of methods

This document presents the safety aspects of ATC and gives an overview of existing approaches for the design of a safety-critical ATC system. Its goal is twofold:

• firstly, to provide an introduction to problems concerning interactive safety critical systems that we aim to address in the project, with particular attention to the ATC application domain;
• secondly, to provide an overview of existing approaches that we consider relevant for the design of an interactive safety-critical ATC system and we plan to extend and apply in the continuation of the project.

Deliv 1/3: ATC operations and case studies

This document presents a first selection of ATC case studies that are of interest for the project. The purpose of the case study selection is to identify specific parts of the application area considered in the MEFISTO project (Air Traffic Control) that are industrially relevant and raise interesting research issues. These case studies (or part of them) are going to be used to apply the methods and techniques for user interface design and evaluation developed in the project in order to verify and evaluate their utility and innovation with respect to the current practise.

In Air Traffic Control the different phases of a flight require different applications to be controlled and each application raises different requirements for its user interface design. Moreover, the use of different technologies can introduce additional issues from a usability and safety point of view. The case studies have been selected in such a way to raise complementary issues which allow the project to have a complete view of the possible usability and safety problems to solve. More specifically three case studies have been considered during the first year of the project:

• en-route phase with data link support (CENA is the partner in charge to provide background information);
• approach phase (Alenia and DERA are partners in charge to provide background information);
• aerodrome phase (Alenia is the partner in charge to provide background information).

In the en route air traffic the possibility of an accident is usually low. However the increasing traffic and some limitations of the voice communication have raised the need to introduce data link communication in addition to the communication via radiotelephony. The effects of the introduction of this new technology are not well understood and there is still a lot of work to do in order to identify the most effective user interfaces and the most efficient related task allocation among the controllers associated with a sector using data link.

The approach phase raises immediately safety issues as it has to handle potential concentration of flights around the airport with time constraints which make the work of the controllers harder and with potential disastrous effects in case of errors.

In the aerodrome phase the traffic of both aircraft and ground vehicles is considered. Many accidents and incidents occur in airports during this phase. The type of technology used to communicate among controllers and drivers is rather different from the other flight phases. Likewise, the user interfaces available are rather different and the issues that they raise can be similar to those of other applications where many ground mobile devices have to be controlled (for example, ambulance systems, taxi control, and bus management). Moreover, there is a strong need for tools supporting decision-making in a highly interactive environment.
 

Deliv 1/4: application of modelling techniques to ATC case studies

This documents describes the first applications of the methods introduced in the deliverable 1/2 document to the case studies detailed in the deliverable 1/3 document. Thus we show examples of task modelling of ATC applications using the ConcurTaskTrees notation, examples of object-oriented modelling of ATC applications using the UML (Unified Modelling Language) approach, and examples of work analysis using Hutchins’ distributed cognition approach.

This analysis and modelling work was useful to improve our understanding of both the application domain and the possibilities of the various techniques considered. The work in the second year will be dedicated to better integrate such techniques, further develop them, especially with the aim to give systematic support to designers and software developers.