A research study on human response to alert trigger in air traffic control radar display

Air traffic demand is growing rapidly and is expected to continue growing in the future due to an increase in global population, higher standard of living and advancement in technology. This increased will present an ever more complex operating environment for both aircraft and Air Traffic Controller (ATCO) as air traffic congestion posed a severe risk to the safe transit of flight. It also increases ATCO’s workload tremendously, making one of the most stressful job even more demanding. It is foreseen that the current collision detection systems such as Short-Term Conflict Alert (STCA) and Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) will not be sufficient in addressing the future demand of air traffic. At such more sophisticated systems and metrics are needed to address the issue of identifying potential conflict in an increasingly congested and complicated airspace. One of the solutions currently under researched is through the integration of colour to provide visual cue to assist ATCO in identifying imminent danger. Past research studies have discovered that colours indeed have the capability to guide attention effectively without experiencing tunnelling effect. This project aims to investigate if the integration of Colour Alert will help ATCO in identifying potential collision faster in a simulated congested airspace. ATCOs’ response time will be used as the monitoring performance metric for this study. It was found that there were distinct differences in conflict detection response time when visual Colour Alert was used against no alert under two different air traffic density condition. Results in this study have shown significant improvement in response time between No Alert and Colour Alert scenario under high air traffic density.Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering