NASA researchers are extending a large-scale distributed simulation to assess the feasibility, benefits, and scalability of Distributed Air/Ground Traffic Management (DAG-TM) concepts. This paper describes applications of software agents to support these efforts. This paper identifies applications ranging from assistants to replacements for human confederate participants and support personnel. ...

OBJECTIVE The aim was to examine whether prospective memory error and response costs to ongoing tasks in an air traffic control simulation could be reduced by providing spatial context. BACKGROUND Prospective memory refers to remembering to perform an intended action at an appropriate point in the future. Failures of prospective memory can occur in air traffic control. METHOD For this study...

The global Air Traffic Management (ATM) system represents one of the most complex human-machine systems known. As the system has evolved in step with traffic demands, automation has been increasingly called upon to augment the capacities of the human operator, namely the air traffic controller. Future generations of ATM automation seek to augment, or even replace, such human faculties as decisi...

The next generation of air traffic control will require automation in order to meet safety, reliability, flexibility, and robustness demands in an environment of steadily increasing air traffic density. Optimization, however, is an inadequate paradigm for the design of a cooperative distributed air traffic control system. The problem stems from a fundamental limitation of von Neumann-Morgenster...

In this thesis, I address the opportunities and challenges involved in applying natural language processing techniques to the control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The problem of controlling an unmanned aircraft via natural language inputs is formulated as a feedback control problem, and notions of state, controllability, and observability are defined under this model. An implementation o...

Distributed Artificial Intelligence is concerned with problem solving in which groups solve tasks. In this paper we describe strategies of cooperation that groups require to solve shared tasks effectively. We discuss such strategies in the context of a specific group problem solving application: collision avoidance in air traffic control. Experimental findings with four distinct air-traffic con...

This paper describes an early approach to understanding current air traffic control (ATC) systems. The analysis is based on a distributed cognition analysis of the representations present in air traffic control, and their distribution, manipulation, and propagation through the ATC system. The work is being carried out as part of the Esprit Mefisto project, and has as an eventual aim the explora...

The increase in air traffic has the immediate consequence of creating new techniques for air traffic control, as well as new procurement data procedures and data reporting. For these purposes, secondary radars have been developed under the standard ADS-B that should be implemented in coming years on a mandatory basis. In this article, an application of ADS-B radars, capable of introducing the a...

The adverse effects of traffic-related air pollution on children's respiratory health have been widely reported, but few studies have evaluated the impact of traffic-control policies designed to reduce urban air pollution. We assessed associations between traffic-related air pollutants and respiratory/allergic symptoms amongst 8-9 year-old schoolchildren living within the London Low Emission Zo...

We address a problem in air traffic management: scheduling flights in order to minimize the maximum number of aircraft that simultaneously lie within a single air traffic control sector at some time t. Since the problem is a generalization of the NP-hard nowait job-shop scheduling, we resort to heuristics. We report experimental results for real-world flight data.