Supporting air traffic control collaboration with a TableTop system

Collaboration is key to safety and efficiency in Air Traffic Control. Legacy paper-based systems enable seamless and non-verbal collaboration, but trends in new software and hardware for ATC tend to separate controllers more and more, which hinders collaboration. This paper presents a new interactive system designed to support collaboration in ATC. We ran a series of interviews and workshops to identify collaborative situations in ATC. From this analysis, we derived a set of requirements to support collaboration: support mutual awareness, communication and coordination, dynamic task allocation and simultaneous use with more than two people. We designed a set of new interactive tools to fulfill the requirements, by using a multi-user tabletop surface, appropriate feedthrough, and reified and partially accomplishable actions. Preliminary evaluation shows that feedthrough is important, users benefit from a number of tools to communicate and coordinate their actions, and the tabletop is a...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CSCW
• Authors: Stéphane Conversy, Hélène Gaspard-Boulinc, Stéphane Chatty, Stéphane Valès, Carole Dupré, Claire Ollagnon
• Keywords: Air Traffic Control, Collaboration, CSCW 2011, Mutual Awareness, Social Sciences