Supporting air traffic control collaboration with a TableTop system

  • Authors:
  • Stéphane Conversy;Hélène Gaspard-Boulinc;Stéphane Chatty;Stéphane Valès;Carole Dupré;Claire Ollagnon

  • Affiliations:
  • ENAC - IRIT - University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France;ENAC - University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France;ENAC - IntuiLab - University of Toulouse, Toulouse Cedex 4, France;IntuiLab, Toulouse, France;IntuiLab, Toulouse, France;Intactile Design, Montpellier, France

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Collaboration is key to safety and efficiency in Air Traffic Control. Legacy paper-based systems enable seamless and non-verbal collaboration, but trends in new software and hardware for ATC tend to separate controllers more and more, which hinders collaboration. This paper presents a new interactive system designed to support collaboration in ATC. We ran a series of interviews and workshops to identify collaborative situations in ATC. From this analysis, we derived a set of requirements to support collaboration: support mutual awareness, communication and coordination, dynamic task allocation and simultaneous use with more than two people. We designed a set of new interactive tools to fulfill the requirements, by using a multi-user tabletop surface, appropriate feedthrough, and reified and partially-accomplishable actions. Preliminary evaluation shows that feedthrough is important, users benefit from a number of tools to communicate and coordinate their actions, and the tabletop is actually usable by three people both in tightly coupled tasks and parallel, individual activities. At a higher level, we also found that co-location is not enough to generate mutual awareness if users are not engaged in meaningful collaboration.