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Team from Delft University of Technology wins the award
for best oral presentation and paper at the IEEE Systems,
Man, and Cybernetics Society Conference 2014
The paper "Ecological Interface Design: Control Space Robustness in Future Trajectory-
based Air Traffic Control Decision Support" (Rolf Klomp co-authored with Clark Borst and
Gesa Praetorius) has won the IEEE SMC Award for the best oral presentation and paper at
the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society Conference 2014. This work is co-financed
by EUROCONTROL acting on behalf of the SESAR Joint Undertaking (the SJU) and the
EUROPEAN UNION as part of Work Package E (project C-SHARE: Joint ATM Cognition
through Shared Representations) in the SESAR Program.
Winning Paper:
Ecological Interface Design: Control Space Robustness in Future
Trajectory-based Air Traffic Control Decision Support
The ongoing growth of air traffic worldwide is foreseen to exceed the capacity limits of the
current Air Traffic Management (ATM) system within the coming decades. In order to facilitate
this increasing demand, two large-scale international collaborative research efforts (SESAR in
Europe and NextGen in the US) are focused on majorly overhauling the basic principles of
how air traffic is controlled. A key pillar within both research projects is to transition from the
current, hands on, form of tactical control towards highly precise time-based strategic
airspace management. Rather than issuing discrete instructions by direct voice
communication, the language between air traffic controllers and pilots will be that of
automatically generated 4D-trajectories via digital data-link.
Although the success of such a system relies heavily upon the introduction of advanced
automation and a new communication infrastructure there is a general consensus in
operational communities that the human air traffic controller should remain in active control.
That is, given that the stakes are high and that the work domain has too many unforeseen
situations to allow for a fully automated solution, the human controller will have to retain the
ultimate responsibility for the safety of operations. These responsibilities, together with the
complexities of the new task, require the development of innovative controller decision support
tools.
