The Crew Workload Manager: An Open-loop Adaptive System Design for Next Generation Flight Decks

This paper presents an open loop adaptive system intended to address workload imbalances in future, high-workload flight decks. Air traffic in Europe is expected to more than double by 2020. New technologies being proposed will significantly add to pilot roles and responsibilities, and has the potential to add further periods of high workload to pilot operations. The CAMMI (Cognitive Adaptive Man Machine Interface) program addresses human factors priorities in the aviation domain by developing concepts that balance operator workload, support added future operator roles and responsibilities and resulting new task and information requirements, while allowing operators to focus on the most safety critical tasks. The Crew Workload Manager (CWLM) is a research prototype that objectively measures, compares, and displays the workload between pilots, and can recommend task sharing or automate lower order tasks as necessary. It is expected that the CWLM will minimize the time pilots spend in unbalanced workload conditions, and thereby reduce errors and pilot fatigue, and improve crew resource management. An evaluation plan is outlined that utilizes the novel Shared Aviation Task Battery.