Overcoming Information Overload in the Cockpit

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA506356&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf

Overcoming Information Overload in the Cockpit

MAJ Tom Deveans, M.S.


ORCEN Technical Report: DSE-TR-0904
DTIC: ADA506356

The survey was designed in three parts in order to establish a hierarchy of information require-
ments for pilots given aircraft type, mission, and situation. The survey results are too numerous to report here, but hopefully we were able to capture the desired data. The state-of-the-art survey of intuitive display technologies focused, for the most part, on tactile technologies. In the end, the most viable solutions werethose offered by the Tactile Situation Awareness System, a newly developed soft-actuator technology whose primary advantages were the quality of the tactor signal, simplicity, and exibility, and the addition of 3D audio. The alternative heads up display symbology survey results showed a way to create an optimal symbology layout based on the concepts of learned habit patterns and a concept called Layout Appropriateness, in which the "appropriateness" of a given layout is computed by weighing the cost of a sequence of actions by how frequently the sequence is performed. The final part of the study involving the use of a non-human in the loop discrete event simulation to compare workloads in the current cockpits, and ones designed with new technologies, showed beyond doubt that the implementation of intuitive display technologies significantlyreduces both the overall and individual resource workload on pilots and copilots alike.