Jean-Paul Imbert

École Nationale de l’Aviation Civile | ENAC · Aeronautical HMI ENAC

In the context of light aviation, airborne communication between pilots and Air Traffic Control (ATC) is at present only ensured orally via a radio channel. To provide safer and more accessible communications and based on a FANS4ALL initiative, we are developing a multimodal Human-Machine Interface (HMI) combining the sight and touch. The device co...

In 2020, the Swiss Federal Council made it a strategic objective to encourage Skyguide (Switzerland’s private air navigation service provider) and social partners (HelvetiCA) to work together to raise the retirement age from the current 56/59 to at least 60. In this context, HelvetiCA and Skyguide agreed to carry out a scientific study (RAFA study)...

The aerospace industry can benefit from conversational agents that provide efficient solutions for safety-of-life scenarios. This industry is characterized by products and systems that require years of engineering to achieve optimal performance within complex environments. With recent advances in retrieval and language models, conversational agents...

In aviation, mental incapacitation refers to a temporary degradation in a pilot's mental abilities, often due to stressful situations. This can result in poor decision-making, as well as a decrease in comprehension, perception, and judgment, leading to the inability to perform the necessary duty as a pilot. Many aviation accidents and incidents are...

En aviation civile, l'incapacitation cognitive désigne l'altération temporaire des facultés cognitives du pilote en réaction à un contexte de stress intense. Elle se traduit par des phénomènes variés tels que la persévération cognitive, des actions de pilotage risquées, etc. Il apparaît important de mieux comprendre l'émergence de l'incapacitation...

Although mind-wandering decreases processing of external information, it remains understudied in air traffic controllers (ATCOs), who must constantly attend to external information. Using autobiographical memory retrieval, we propose an innovative protocol to mimic the moment when ATCOs start mind-wandering. A total of 16 participants performed an...

When a diversion due to an emergency is required in flight, and especially in SOP operations during the approach and landing phases, the pilot's workload increases considerably. To help gathering the relevant information and calculating the new alternative flight paths, we developed a digital assistant for dynamic rerouting, which uses deep learnin...

With Single Pilot Operations, the work that was shared between crew members in the past will be assumed by one pilot. To maintain an adequate level of safety and support the single pilots’ performance and decision-making in complex situations, we investigated a concept of cognitive computing algorithms and adaptive automation implemented in a digit...

To face the pilots’ shortage that could hit the aeronautical world in the future, single-pilot operations are envisaged as a solution. Even if the single pilot will have to assume the tasks that are today done by two pilots in the cockpits, the safety level of the flight should remain the same compared to standard operations. The challenge will be...

Safety studies have identified attention as a recurring cause of incidents and accidents in air traffic control. However, little is known of the precise attentional states that lead to degraded ATC performance. Therefore, we surveyed 150 French en route air traffic controllers on the causes of and impacts on perceived cooperation, safety, and perfo...

The present study aimed at investigating the extent to which Captains’ risky decisions influence young and inexperienced First Officers. Participants (i.e., student pilots who had almost completed their training) had to decide, alone or in a crew configuration, whether to continue or abort the landing according to four risk levels (safe, moderately...

Air Traffic Control (ATC) has been classified as the fourth most stressful job. In this regard, sixteen controllers were asked to perform ecological ATC simulation during which behavioral (Radio Communications with pilots - RCs), subjective (stress perception) and neurophysiological signals (brain activity and skin conductance - SC) were collected....

Stress is a word used to describe human reactions to emotionally, cognitively and physically challenging experiences. A hallmark of the stress response is the activation of the autonomic nervous system, resulting in the “fight-freeze-flight” response to a threat from a dangerous situation. Consequently, the capability to objectively assess and trac...

Attentional tunneling, that is the inability to detect unexpected changes in the environment, has been shown to have critical consequences in air traffic control. The motivation of this study was to assess the design of a cognitive countermeasure dedicated to mitigate such failure of attention. The Red Alert cognitive countermeasure relies on a bri...

We investigated the contribution of specific HCI concepts to provide multimodal information to Air Traffic Controlers in the context of Remote Control Towers (i.e. when an airport is controlled from a distant location). We considered interactive spatial sound, tactile stimulation and body movements to design four different interaction and feedback...

Recent technological improvements allow UAS (Unmanned Aircraft System) operators to carry out increasingly long missions. Shift work was introduced during long-endurance missions to reduce the risk of fatigue. However, despite these short work periods and the creation of a fatigue risk management system (FRMS), the occurrence of intense and monoton...

The position and optionally speed and/or size of an entity such as a vehicle in an environment such as an airport, motorway, shipping port or the like may be determined by monitoring a plurality of light sources for occlusion. These light sources may be arbitrary light sources as provided in the environment for unrelated purposes. On the basis of t...

Traffic status feedback is provided by a driveradapted to interface with a human perceptible vibrationtransducer either as a haptic or audio signal, by causingthe transducer to emit a vibration having one or morecharacteristics defined in proportion to traffic data. Thetraffic data may relate to a particular space, and be mod-ulated as a function o...

New solutions in operational environments are often, among objective measurements, evaluated by using subjective assessment and judgment from experts. Anyhow, it has been demonstrated that subjective measures suffer from poor resolution due to a high intra and inter-operator variability. Also, performance measures, if available, could provide just...

In an effort to simplify human resource management and reduce costs, control towers are now more and more designed to not be implanted directly on the airport but remotely. This concept, known as Remote Control Tower, offers a “digital” working context because the view on the runways is broadcast remotely via cameras, which are located on the physi...

This study aims at investigating the possibility to employ neurophysiological measures to assess the humanmachine interaction effectiveness. Such a measure can be used to compare new technologies or solutions, with the final purpose to enhance operator's experience and increase safety. In the present work, two different interaction modalities (Norm...

Several models defining different types of cognitive human behaviour are available. For this work, we have selected the Skill, Rule and Knowledge (SRK) model proposed by Rasmussen in 1983. This model is currently broadly used in safety critical domains, such as the aviation. Nowadays, there are no tools able to assess at which level of cognitive co...

This article provides the reader a focused and organised review of the research progresses on neurophysiological indicators, also called “neurometrics”, to show how neurometrics could effectively address some of the most important Human Factors (HFs) needs in the Air Traffic Management (ATM) field. The state of the art on the most involved HFs and...

Adaptive Automation (AA) is a promising approach to keep the task workload demand within appropriate levels in order to avoid both the under- and over-load conditions, hence enhancing the overall performance and safety of the human-machine system. The main issue on the use of AA is how to trigger the AA solutions without affecting the operative tas...

The current study examines the role of cognitive and perceptual loads in inattentional deafness (the failure to perceive an auditory stimulus) and the possibility to predict this phenomenon with ocular measurements. Twenty participants performed Air Traffic Control (ATC) scenarios—in the Laby ATC-like microworld—guiding one (low cognitive load) or...

We detail an empirical animation study to assess how display design and user spatial ability and training might influence visuo-spatial decision-making with animated displays showing aircraft movements. We present empirical results of a visuo-spatial detection task with moving objects, based on response accuracy, response time, including a descript...

The Air Traffic Control (ATC) environment is complex and safety-critical. Whilst exchanging information with pilots, controllers must also be alert to visual notifications displayed on the radar screen (e.g., warning which indicates a loss of minimum separation between aircraft). Under the assumption that attentional resources are shared between vi...

Nous présentons en détail une expérimentation évaluant des tâches utilisateurs dans un contexte de visualisation dynamique représentant des mouvements d'avions sur une interface de contrôle aérien. Nous cherchons à évaluer l’influence des principes d’affichage et du niveau d’expertise sur les aptitudes spatiales des participants à prendre des décis...

We detail an empirical study to assess how display design and user background might influence information recognition with animations of movement data. We present results concerning response accuracy, response time, including a descriptive eye movement analysis. We found significant differences in visuo-spatial task detection with animations across...

Machine-learning approaches for mental workload (MW) estimation by using the user brain activity went through a rapid expansion in the last decades. In fact, these techniques allow now to measure the MW with a high time resolution (e.g. few seconds). Despite such advancements, one of the outstanding problems of these techniques regards their abilit...

The Air Traffic Control (ATC) environment is complex and safety-critical; operators work in dynamic situations and must make high-risk decisions under stress and temporal pressure. The high perceptual load involved in ATC means that controllers’ attention must be shared between several subtasks, with few or no remaining attentional capacity for pro...

Abstract. Eye tracking (ET) provides various data like gaze position, pupil size, and eye movement events (blinks, fixations, saccades, etc.). These data can reveal users' cognitive/attentional state but also provide a worthwhile input to human-computer interfaces. Recording and processing such data is an issue es- pecially when integrating ET syst...

During their initial and on-the-job training, air traffic controllers communicate with human operators called pseudo-pilots who act as pilots for several simulated aircraft. With the expected increase in air traffic, a significantly higher number of aircraft will be handled during the simulations. The existing tools and working methods of the pseud...

Air traffic control is undergoing a great change due to the increase of traffic and the evolution of the control tools. The greater number of aircrafts managed by the controller implies a much greater load of information to deal with and memorize than before. A significant part of accidents’ causes is already due to the problem of information perce...

The aim of this paper is to present an extensive neurophysiological study of the Air-Traffic-Controllers (ATCos) during en route ATC simulations. In other words, the purpose was to extract neurophysiological features suitable for evaluate the learning progress and for estimate in real-time the user's workload level. In collaboration with ENAC (Toul...

The LABY microworld, a functional simulation of Air Traffic Control (ATC), captures the underlying processes involved in electronic air traffic management with a simplified version of the operational human-machine interface. LABY is a computer-based human-in-the-loop dynamic environment whereby a controller must issue directional commands to guide...

Large display screens are common in supervisory tasks, meaning that alerts are often perceived in peripheral vision. Five air traffic control notification designs were evaluated in their ability to capture attention during an ongoing supervisory task, as well as their impact on the primary task. A range of performance measures, eye-tracking and sub...

The aim of this work was to analyze the possibility to apply a neuroelectrical cognitive metrics for the evaluation of the training level of subjects during the learning of a task employed by Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs). In particular, the Electroencephalogram (EEG), the Electrocardiogram (ECG) and the Electroculogram (EOG) signals were gathered...

The acoustic environment is critical in Air Traffic Control (ATC), as operators exchange information with planes and must also be aware of the occurrence of auditory alarms. In such situations, observing inattentional deafness is likely. In this study, we aimed to identify the physiological indicators of inattentional deafness through the analysis...

http://www.sesarinnovationdays.eu/files/2013/Posters/SID%202013%20poster%20NINA.pdf

This article deals with the introduction of partial automation in the En-Route air traffic control working position. More precisely, it presents an experiment whose objective is to evaluate the generated impact on air traffic controllers by the use of a more automated environment, including a conflict aid services system (conflict detector and solv...

This article deals with the introduction of partial automation in the En-Route air traffic control working position. More precisely, it presents an experiment whose objective is to evaluate the generated impact on air traffic controllers by the use of a more automated environment, including a conflict aid services system (conflict detector and solv...

The iterative approach in the development of Human Machine Interfaces involves the validation of design choices on both aspects of design and means of interaction. In the case of complex interfaces, conduct evaluations of such choices can be very difficult and expensive. In the field of air traffic control, especially for the design of the controll...

The goal of Air Traffic Controllers (ATCo) is to maximize both safety and capacity, so as to accept all flights without compromising the life of the passengers or creating delays. Because air traffic is expected to double by 2030, new IT systems must be developed to manage this traffic increase while maintaining or improving safety. ATCo radar scre...

Abstract. Improving realism in simulations is a critical issue. In some air traffic control (ATC) simulations we use a pseudo-pilot which pilots up to fifteen aircraft. Thus, having the same voice for different aircraft in the case of pseudo-pilot decreases the realism of the simulation and may be confusing for the controllers especially in study c...