Digital assistants have the innovation potential to transform the operational room by anticipating complex traffic scenarios, forecasting airspace sector workload and allowing more efficient and environmentally-friendly routing—all while increasing safety.

SafeTeam will incorporate human factors expertise according to the targeted level of autonomy and corresponding controller-machine tasks distribution. The safety-critical level will be considered in the definition of the use case and its implementation. The validation exercises will monitor how the information provided is ingested by the controller as well as its impact on the workload, situational awareness, and other safety indicators.

This case study aims at providing predictions to the crew in the cockpit when there is high probability that the flight becomes unstable.

The design principles, distribution of automation roles and validation exercises proposed in SafeTeam will make this use case achieve TRL6. Meanwhile, the performance during these exercises will be monitored and assessed by human factors experts. Aspects like the concrete threshold, or how much heads up needs to be given to crew in order for predictions to be useful, will be defined in collaboration with operational experts (pilots and safety managers) and human factors professionals, as well as the appropriate interface defining how the information needs to be showed.  

An intelligent agent will be developed to observe sensor data from real and virtual aircraft alongside other environmental data sources (cockpit microphones, eye tracking, video feeds).as the actuator of the digital assistant in this case study. The agent will automatically interrogate these data sources with the aim of supporting instructors in their assessment of pilot competencies.

An agent that can analyse human data and pilot competencies can be considered to be highly innovative in the field of pilot training. This agent will help bring concordance across instructors by providing objective data for them to engage with crew and identify and resolve root causes to issues.