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IPA - Intelligent Pilot Asssistant

Comcept of Pilot Aisstant System.

The continuous growth of civil air traffic accompaanied by new ATM proceddures and philosophies on one hand and the growing complexity of military missions in the other hand all put new demands on the aircrews. Many systems have been designed in the past to solve individual tasks, but this approach is reaching its limits.

One approach to overcome those limit is the pilot assistance system, an integrated system which combines all required assistance functions under a single HMI. A key feature of such systems are situation assessment functions which allow automatic reaction in critical situations. This feature greatly reduces pilot workload in situations where support is most needed and where conventional systens require too much input, since they don't recognize the situation and therefore are unable to derive the requiered actions themselves.

The Intelligent Pilot Assistant is developed at the

Pilots in the Cockpit

Institute of Flight Guidance to provide a framework in which new assistance funtions can easily be added and combined with the existing functions. The development of this system is based on the experience gained with the Crew Assistant for Military Aircraft (CAMA), a pilot assistant system jointly developed by the University of the German Armed Forces, Daimler Chrysler Aerospace, the Elektronik- und Logistik GmbH and DLR. The CAMA system combines all assistant functions for a military transport mission in one integrated system and has received high notes in simulations with military pilots.

For the Intelligent Pilot Assistant a generic architecture based on object oriented methods and providing templates for function modukes has been developed that sgnificantly reduces development and integration costs for new assistant functions. Based on this architecture, assistant systems for a civil Free Flight scenario and for military helicopter missions respectively are being developed. In the near future, the functionality of the civil system will be expanded to include full gate-to-gate assistance functions.