Today, on 12th of December, more than 75 international distinguished guests visited DLR to eye-witness for the first time splitting & merging procedures to handover aerodromes in between of multiple remote tower positions. The procedure of splitting & merging is seen by operational experts as a promising candidate to balance overload situations like increasing traffic load or non-nominal situation.
From 3rd to 11th of December 2018 the Lithuanian ANSP SE ORO NAVIGACIJA (ON), FREQUENTIS AG, and DLR performed the validation “EXE-05.03-V2-3.1_ON” on behalf of the SESAR2020 project PJ05 “Remote Tower for Multiple airports” in its solution 05-03 “Flexible allocation of aerodromes”.
In a V2 human-in-the-loop real time simulation at the DLR Remote Tower Lab, six Lithuanian controllers managed up to 3 aerodromes in a multiple remote environment. They are provided with a newly developed flight strip planning system from FREQUENTIS AG supporting them to better plan ahead upcoming traffic and to handover or takeover aerodromes to/from an ATCO colleague to/from another working position to better balance their workload.
DLR researchers assessed the controllers’ eye point of regard, their perceived situation awareness, workload and acceptance as well as efficiency and safety in handling the new splitting & merging procedure, compared them with data from according baseline scenarios and thus could judge about operational feasibility and operational improvements.
The Open Day started with some introductory sessions on the exercise set up and on the validation design and was followed by observation of a real run in the Remote Tower lab with splitting & merging procedures. Afterwards the audience was given the chance to discuss with the controllers, engineers and human factors experts the concept under validation.
The presentations held can be downloaded here:
Introduction_2018-12-12_Open-Day_EXEV2-3.1_Braunschweig_DLR1
Validation-Set-Up_2018-12-12_Open-Day_EXEV2-3.1_Braunschweig_DLR2
Smart-Planner_2018-12-12_Open-Day_EXEV2-3.1_Braunschweig_FRQ
