Solution-Space-Based Analysis of Dynamic Air Traffic Controller Workload

Air traffic controller workload is considered to be a limiting factor to air traffic growth. Previous research introduced the static solution space approach to assess the difficulty of aircraft merging tasks. In this paper the dynamic, tangent-based solution space will be introduced that includes the future trajectory intent of all aircraft. Metrics derived from the solution space, together with common metrics, were tested for correlations with controller workload. An experiment has been conducted where subjects were required to line up all aircraft in a sector towards a certain waypoint, while periodically rating their workload. High correlations were found between several solution space related metrics and subjective workload ratings. In contrast to the number of aircraft metric, which had the highest correlation with workload, the dynamic solution space may allow for controller workload prediction in real-time.