Leaving the traditional working position: the potential of introducing digital controllers in air traffic control

Air traffic control (ATC) is facing a major challenge: while traffic volume is increasing, staff numbers are decreasing. Already in 2023, ATC was responsible for more than 50% of the delays in the air traffic system due to capacity and staff issues. With an expected staff gap of more than 700 controllers in Europe, an improvement of the situation is unlikely in the next decade. One countermeasure to improve ATC efficiency is a higher level of automation. Having less tasks, controllers should be able to handle more traffic and have the potential to optimize flight profiles with regards to environmental factors. Multiple research approaches focus on autonomy and propose that artificial intelligence is used to automate decision making of air traffic control. Despite large benefits, these approaches contain challenging ethical questions and certification challenges which require further efforts to be solved. This paper suggests to introduce a digital controller which handles a broad range of tasks and provides aggregated information to the human controller. The human controller is responsible for decision-making, while the digital controller offers recommendations to the human controller and implements the decision. The required technologies to achieve this, such as advanced radar systems, speech recognition / understanding and datalink, are available today. Enabling these technologies by a tailored human–machine interface for the interaction with the digital controller will reduce the task load of the human controller. The paper defines an operational concept and technical requirements for this purpose and presents a design for a human–machine interface. The benefits of this approach are quantified based on a task model. Thereby, the reduction in the number of tasks as well as the interaction time with the controller working position is evaluated.