🇮🇸 Tern Systems receives a SESAR grant
Tern Systems Aware project has been awarded a 637.000 EUR SESAR grant from the European Union Horizon fund. The grant is awarded to Tern Systems to conduct research and development on human-machine collaboration with artificial situational awareness to provide appropriate supportive actions to the air traffic control officers (ATCOs).
The research project has been named AWARE and its goal is to enable human-machine collaboration by using an artificial situational awareness system which is enabling AI to anticipate and respond to human needs by understanding human intent and goals.Â
While humans are extensively trained to understand the capabilities, limitations, and functionality of the machines they are using, further improvements in human-machine collaboration are currently hindered by the machines lack of awareness of the intent of humans.
The research project will develop and test an AI Assistant Application providing adaptable human-centric support to enhance air traffic controller’s (ATCO) performance and to reduce ATCO’s workload despite high task complexity. This will be achieved by development of a human-machine collaboration environment that relies on recognition of ATCO’s intent, the ATCO’s situational awareness (compared to a machine’s situational awareness) and the ATCO’s mental load.
ATCO’s intent will be analysed by tracking their attention and human-machine interactions and comparing them to the tasks that need solving as assessed by the artificial situational awareness system. Adaptable support will then be provided either in solving the task they are currently focused on or solving an unrelated task autonomously.
This will allow ATCOs to maintain their skills and expertise while preventing a shift towards supervisory control that has been demonstrated to undermine human capability to take-over in situations with degraded automation. A goal of the adaptable and human-aware system is to maintain ATCOs in an active role, to train their skills and expertise on the job while selectively using higher levels of automation to augment capacity. ATCOs are supported in their tasks rather than substituted by automation. It is expected that ATCOs can handle high-complexity scenarios when assisted by an attention-aware support system. ATCO workload is expected to decrease with the use of support functions.
Tern Systems will provide its expertise in leading work in development activities, focusing on defining and developing the platform of AWARE for ATCOs and integrating into Tern’s Polaris ATM system and Orion ATM simulator. Creating modern HMI and robust backend services for simulation and operation in ATM has been the focus for Tern Systems and it will be contributing its technical experts to the project.
Tern Systems research partners are the University of Zagreb, International Federation Of Air Traffic Controllers Associations (IFATCA), The Swedish Civil Aviation Administration (LFV), SLOT Consulting, Ukrainian State Air Traffic Services Enterprise, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Universitat Linz and Zurich University of Applied Sciences.
The photos included with the text are from the kick-off meeting of the research project at EUROCONTROL’s headquarters in Brussels, which was held this June. Representing Tern Systems at the meeting were Urszula Kasperska, HólmfrÃður Elvarsdóttir, and Gunnar Magnússon.
Originally published on 22 July by Tern Systems.
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