Title: Alternative Strategies for Distributed Work in the Air Traffic Management System
Abstract: ‡This paper discusses human performance in distributed work environments in which decision making under uncertainty is a central feature. It explores the effects of changes over the past decade in the architecture for distributing work within subsystems of the National Aviation System (NAS), emphasizing interactions of dispatchers with FAA traffic managers. These alternative architectures are discussed in terms of the way the system is decomposed into tasks, the locus of control and access to relevant knowledge and data, and the impact of uncertainty under various architectures. Historically, efforts to deal with complexity and uncertainty have oversimplified consideration of uncertainty by making predictions about a likely eventuality and developing a single operational scenario based on this prediction. Recent changes in the NAS could allow traffic managers and dispatchers to communicate their beliefs about a range of possible weather and traffic constraints and coordinate their responses based on the state of their knowledge at times when they must act, thus increasing their decision making flexibility. Because uncertainty about weather and traffic varies over time, often becoming smaller as an event draws nearer, planners could eliminate certain contingency plans (or introduce new ones) as the time approached for each discrete decision. By communicating within this more expressive framework, data and knowledge can be shared that allow both traffic managers and dispatchers to plan the actions under their control in a more informed manner. To fully benefit from such a planning and communications system, several steps need to be taken, including: Distributed development and sharing of weather and traffic scenarios; Organization-level plan generation: Identification of preferences and constraints and development of scenariospecific action plans; System-level generation of scenario-specific plans and integration of cross-scenario plans; Ongoing plan revision as circumstances change in the course of the scenarios; and Development of an accommodating environment for plan execution. The rationale for such a program is summarized. I. Background For over a decade, we and many others have been searching for ways to facilitate collaborative decision making among FAA traffic flow managers (TFM) and dispatchers and pilots responsible for flight operations in the National Airspace System (NAS). The NAS is a distributed system involving many air traffic control centers and traffic managers and controllers in a large number of surface facilities and a larger number of aircraft, operated by a variety of industrial and governmental organizations, pursuing private and public business in our airspace. The effective management and direction of these aircraft relies upon an immense amount of data and information, much of it highly dynamic, about a great many variables. Some of these variables are under the control of airspace system managers, but others, such as weather phenomena and their movements, cannot be controlled and
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-06-19
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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