ABSTRACT
The Federal Aviation Administration’s Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) concept proposes a suite of decision support tools for use in the air traffic control tower to support safe and efficient operations. This paper describes the proposed set of surface automation capabilities to support ground and local controller activities in the NextGen mid-term, including automated decision support tools to generate taxi routes and monitor pilot conformance to an assigned taxi route. The MITRE Corporation’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) conducted two human-in-the-loop experiments to evaluate ground controller performance with these decision support tools. These simulations specifically examined capabilities provided in surface automation designed by Mosaic ATM. This paper describes the results of those two experiments to refine and validate surface decision support tool concepts.
