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Controller Assistance



The department of Controller Assistance develops and tests methods and procedures to support operators in the monitoring, planning and guidance of the parameters for safe and efficient functioning of the system. The system primarily under investigation is the traffic in the air and on the ground monitored by air traffic controllers.

High traffic density airports are becoming more and more the bottlenecks in the overall transport network. This presents a challenge to the mobility of people that has to be met by using existing infrastructure in an efficient and environmental friendly manner.

Key drivers for improvements are performance indicators such as safety, capacity, punctuality, aircraft noise reduction and carbon dioxide emissions, as well as the associated costs for fuel and noise protection measures. New and optimized procedures, supported by highly automated systems, are developed to ensure the efficient use of existing infrastructure. Automation assists controllers to guide air and ground traffic in a time and location based manner with adequate accuracy.

Controller Assistance strives to answer the following key questions:

  • How can improvements be achieved in productivity, capacity, punctuality, environmental impact, safety, and predictability for ATM?
  • How can air traffic controllers be supported to detect exceptional situations and assisted in possible solutions, while keeping them in the decision loop?
  • What new operational procedures and methods have to be developed for this purpose?
  • How do systems have to be designed in assisting air traffic controllers?
  • How can controller tasks be kept manageable in a sufficient level of workload?
  • What measures and actions are required to introduce these systems?
  • Can the concepts of air traffic control be adapted to other domains?

The strategic goal of the department is to support air traffic management by using modular systems that can be applied in different flight phases. For this purpose, prototype systems and procedures are developed and established that also meet non-functional requirements, such as resilience and reusability. The applicability of these concepts is validated in human-in-the-loop simulations by the real end-users.


Contact
Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Schier-Morgenthal
Head of Department: Controller Assistance

German Aerospace Center

Institute of Flight Guidance
, Controller Assistance
Braunschweig

Tel.: +49 531 295-2337

Links
Publications of the Controller Assistance department
Handouts
4D-CARMA - 4 Dimensional Cooperative Arrival Manager (0.65 MB)
AMAN Flyer.pdf (0.12 MB)
CADEO Flyer (0.35 MB)
TriControl - Multimodal ATC Interaction (0.53 MB)
Information for students
Leitfaden Stud. Arbeiten
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