Visualization of Complex Situations to Strengthen Human-Automation Collaboration

Automation in today's world has helped human operators accomplish several tasks in limited time. Therefore, humans’ role in automated environments are shifting from operational tasks to supervisory tasks. In complex environments such as air traffic control, supervisory tasks become difficult to manage during unforeseen situations as the controller needs to have a clear understanding of different operational levels in the system and make decisions about them in a limited amount of time. For the operators working with highly complex information-rich automated systems, an improper way of presenting the information would waste operator's cognitive resources resulting in inefficient decision making and increase in risk of failure. In this research proposal goals and plans are described for doing research on design and visualization of information specifically applied to high-stake automated environments. The research project initially addresses the problem in the domain of air traffic control. The contribution of the project to the field so far has been design and development of an interactive tool, which visualizes the information about conflict solution space to facilitate decision making process. The research project is planned to be completed over the course of a four-year PhD studies.