Human-Centered Design of Adaptive Planning Tools for Airport Surface Management

Two critical requirements for an effective airport surface management system are: The need to adapt plans both strategically and tactically because of time-varying uncertainty. The need to support coordination and collaboration among a number of different individuals, including controllers in the ATC Tower (ATCT), traffic managers in the ATCT, ARTCCs, TRACONs and ATCSCC, dispatchers and air traffic control coordinators at Flight Operations Centers, and ramp controllers/supervisors at airports. NASA has developed algorithms to support such strategic and tactical adaptive planning for airport surface management. This proposal seeks to complement and support this line of research and development through the definition of roles, responsibilities and procedures for coordination and collaboration among these individuals as they adapt airport departure queues at spots and runways to deal with evolving conditions. It further seeks to design and complete formative evaluations for interface designs that make use of NASA's adaptive planning algorithms.

Flight operators, airport operators and FAA staff all need tools to better support their roles in airport surface management tasks. Industry is developing a number of such tools to market to these organizations. The interface designs and underlying operational concepts developed through this SBIR should offer significant improvements in the design of such surface management tools. The results of this SBIR should therefore create opportunities for our company to partner with such vendors in the development of such tools, making use of the interface design concepts that we have developed, as well as the expertise that we have developed and demonstrated through the completion of this SBIR.

NASA is developing and testing new operational concepts for airport surface management in order to improve future performance in the NAS. The work completed under this project will help to refine these operational concepts in terms of the roles, responsibilities, procedures and interface designs necessary to integrate tactical and strategic planning algorithms for departure queue management into an effective human-centered design that supports coordination and collaboration among the relevant stakeholders. The work will also provide guidance regarding potential refinements of NASA's algorithms to more effectively support such collaborative work. The conceptual findings will support improvements of the operational concepts developed by NASA. In addition, the interface designs can be integrated into NASA's simulation capabilities to enable more effective Human-in-the-Loop studies.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 2) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.