Development of neurometrics for selective attention evaluation in ATM

The European Air Traffic Management (ATM) system is expected to face challenging situations, with the growth of air traffic, the increase of its complexity, the introduction of innovative concepts and increased automation. The roles and tasks of Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs) will change in the future and it is vital to enhance the comprehension of human responses to their role changing, that is, from active control to monitoring of complex situations and managing unexpected system disruptions. ATCOs performance is recognised to be impacted by several aspects such as stress, emotions, available attentional resources, attention focus and so on. In the recent years, the concept of Human Performance Envelope (HPE) has been introduced as new paradigm in Human Factors. Rather than focusing on one individual factor (e.g. fatigue, situation awareness, etc.), the HPE considers their full range, mapping how they work alone or in combination leading to a decreased performance that could affect safety. At the EU level, the STRESS project is currently addressing the research goal of monitoring the operator’s performance by including all the available behavioral and neurophysiological data in order to characterize the Human Factors involved when dealing with the considered task. In line with this, the proposed study will show the results coming from the experiments performed in controlled environment for the evaluation of the user’s attentional level, and the definition of the neurophysiological indexes for the characterization and assessment of the selective attention along the execution of ATM activity.