Through the Lens: A New Approach to Decision Modeling under Free Flight

Air traffic management (ATM) concepts of the future are committed towards significantly enhancing the capacity and making flying even safer. Since, these new ATM concepts will change the roles and responsibilities of pilots and the air traffic controllers, it is important that their impact on safety be evaluated. Many proposed schemes includes shifting the separation assurance function (maintaining safe distances between aircraft) to the cockpit from ground based air traffic control, and to assign a supervisory role to the air traffic controller, who would make decisions in exceptional cases. Some initial research in this direction has shown that controllers cannot intervene effectively without decision support tools like “conflict probes”. Furthermore controllers and pilots have different strategies for resolving conflicts about separation and airspace. Accordingly, there is a need to better understand and classify the decision-making behavior of different agents in the future proposed ATM system. This paper presents a theoretical discussion outlining the application of the Lens Model of Brunswik to provide insight into some of the research questions posed in conflict detection and resolution by future ATM concepts. We illustrate the approach through an example case study.