Safety Aspects of Supporting Apron Controllers with Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Integrated into an Advanced Surface Movement Guidance and Control System

The information air traffic controllers (ATCos) communicate via radio telephony is valuable for digital assistants to provide additional safety. Yet, ATCos have to enter this information manually. Assistant-based speech recognition (ABSR) has proven to be a lightweight technology that automatically extracts and successfully feeds the content of ATC communication into digital systems without additional human effort. This article explains how ABSR can be integrated into an advanced surface movement guidance and control system (A-SMGCS). The described validations were performed in the complex apron simulation training environment of Frankfurt Airport with 14 apron controllers in a human-in-the-loop simulation in summer 2022. The integration significantly reduces the workload of controllers and increases safety as well as overall performance. Based on a word error rate of 3.1%, the command recognition rate was 91.8% with a callsign recognition rate of 97.4%. This performance was enabled by the integration of A-SMGCS and ABSR: the command recognition rate improves by more than 15% absolute by considering A-SMGCS data in ABSR