Model Analysis of the Efficacy of Advanced Flight Deck Display Concepts

The application of mathematical models of the functioning of pilots with respect to cockpit instrumentation is briefly discussed, in light of the progress which has been made towards the wedding of our existing knowledge about the control and decision-making capabilities of (well-trained) human operators with our ability conveniently to formulate and thus quantify, on the basis of perceptual cues and psychophysical limitations, the information content of various display concepts. This (relatively new) human engineering tool is expected to play a major role in the designing of future flight deck displays whose inevitable implementation will be made possible by the technical advances presently being made in digital avionics. One consequence of this technology is the tendency towards almost completely automated flight, whereby the role of the pilot is evolving from a system regulator to a system supervisor. It is therefore incumbent upon our modelling “technology” to be able to predict not only manual control performance and workload but the human operator's monitoring and failure detection behaviour as well. These considerations form the motivation in this presentation for a predictive analysis, using optimal control and statistical decision theoretic models, of pilot behaviour during both manual and monitored approach to landing scenarios, as a function of the information content of a sequence of perspective status display formats.