Study On Evaluation Method Of Pilot Mental Workload For Transport Aircraft

Head-Up Display(HUD) is an essential part in modern cockpit display system, and it will be introduced to transport aircraft successively, but there is an inadequate operation experience of HUD in our country at present. As the introduction of advanced synthetic display instrument in cockpit, an excessive low or high pilot mental workload level will be unfavorable to the pilot's flight operations, and it will reduce pilot performance, or even be dangerous to flight safety. Our research focuses on evaluation method of pilot mental workload, and the results can provide a certain theoretical basis and technical support for civil aircraft cockpit instrument design and pilot workload airworthiness certification. The main research contents are as follows:(1) We make an interpretation to the relevant airworthiness items of human factor in cockpit, analyze the pilot workload related issues, summarize the main evaluation method in pilot mental workload, elabrate a domestic and foreign research of pilot mental workload research, focus on the brain, eye, ECG indexes in physiological measurement, and reveal the development and problem of mental workload research.(2) We combine requirements of pilot workload in airworthiness items with flight simulation experiences, to design and conduct a five side missions in a simulated flight environment, to analyze the variation of physiological indexes under different flight phases,and to conduct a preliminary screening of the sensitive physiological indexes for pilot workload evaluation.(3) We design and conduct the experiment of pilot mental workload in a simulated flight environment. We set up the three levels of mental workload by introducing the N-back paradigm in human factor, combine with the monitoring task based on HUD in cruise phase.Then we make a statistical analysis of subjective, performance, physiological indexes, and select the sensitive indexes for the modeling of mental workload.(4) The NASA-TLX score of subjective evaluation method, the N-back accuracy of task performance evaluation method, the fixation frequency and total fixation time ofphysiological indexes were selected to built up the logic regression(Logistic) model, Fisher projection and discriminant model to discriminate the three pilot mental workload levels, both of them can achieve the discrimination of the mental workload levels very well, and a further contrastive analysis has been conducted.