The evaluation of remote tower visual assistance system in preparation of two design concepts

In the last couple of years, the interest in remote tower operation systems has increased, as a concept to provide cost-efficient air traffic control service to airports. Attempts are made to stretch the concept to enable multiple remote tower control. A couple of challenges have been identified that need to be mitigated to make the concept feasible. For instance, studies revealed the disadvantage of reduced quality of the video panorama and an increased dispersion of information gathering. Design concepts were derived from the top-down and bottom-up mechanisms of human information processing to support multiple remote tower. These concepts could potentially mitigate the negative effects of a reduced quality of the video panorama and also the dispersion of information gathering. This paper focusses on the reduced quality of the video panorama and uses these design concepts to implement three visual assistance systems. These systems were tested within a laboratory experiment with 40 participants for effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, situation awareness, and workload. The microworld FAirControl was used to simulate an air traffic control monitoring task at a single airport. First, the visual assistance systems were compared against the baseline to assess the improvement of each system. Second, in an explorative approach, the visual assistance systems were compared to identify the advantages and disadvantages against each other. The results show that visual assistance systems can mitigate the influence of the quality-reduced video panorama. The results also indicate that usability of the visual assistance systems is crucial. Participant selective information overlay had the best overall performance