Description
Flight operations today often rely on complex decision-making and context-sensitive interpretations made by human pilots within the aircraft. Today’s pilots also use knowledge accrued through experience, which is often not well specified. For example, pilots in aircraft:
• Use unwritten rules (“tribal knowledge”, for example, for local areas, such as New York)
• Use visual procedures, visual waypoints, and visual route segments (even when an aircraft is always under instrument flight regulations)
• Use loosely written flightcrew procedures with conditional steps
• Handle normal daily variations (e.g., for weather, air traffic control amendments, minor malfunctions and partial system failures)
• Trade off operational flexibility (related to daily variations) with following expected plans
Some of the most challenging long-term research needs involve understanding how new architectures for highly automated vehicles and systems will meet today’s human-centric operational norms and requirements, which are underspecified from an engineering perspective. How can we specify and implement these norms through system requirements for automation?
