Research On Situation Awareness Measurement Indexes Of Tower Control Based On Eye Movement Analysis

As the development of the civil aviation industry,flight traffic increases rapidly.Statistics show that,the air traffic control system of CAAC successfully secured the safety of 7.81 million flights in 2015,with a year-on-year growth of 5.7%.Since the trend of dynamic changes in air traffic and ground information is enhanced,the tower controller has to deal with more dynamic information synthetically to make right control decision and ensure the safe takeoff and landing of aircrafts,which requires the tower controller to have good situation awareness.Poor situation awareness will result in unreasonable allocation of attention resources and improper information searching strategy,further leading to technical errors and cognitive errors,even serious conflict events.Therefore,it is very necessary to measure the situation awareness of the tower controller objectively and effectively.The vision is the most important access to obtain information,on which the tower controller relying judge and make decisions in the work.So this paper study on the tower controller's situation awareness by analyzing the eye movement behavior,to search for available and effective measurement of situation awareness,exploring for measuring tower controller situation awareness.In this study,a tower control simulation experiment platform was built based on the Eye Tribe eye tracker and tower control simulation software,and three groups of experiments with task difficulty as independent variables were designed.20 tower control students from Civil Aviation University of China were recruited to participate in the experiment.In the experiment,eye movement data and three-dimensional situation awareness scale data of the subjects were obtained.After data screening,the effective data of 18 subjects was analyzed for future reaserch.Then the fixation frequency,average fixation duration,average saccade speed,average saccade length,pupil diameter and the Nearest Neighbor Index(NNI)were selected as the observation indexes,with taking the task difficulty as the conditional variable and the situation awareness score as the dependent variable.Using the variance analysis and Pearson correlation analysis to analyze the data,and eye movement indexes havingcertain correlations with the situation awareness were analyzed in depth.The results of data analysis show that,regardless of whether or not the difficulty of the task is considered,there is a significant positive correlation between the average fixation duration of the subjects and their situational awareness,and the correlation between NNI fixation index and situation awareness is significant moderate positive.Analysis of operational errors in actual performance verified the clear correlation between the average fixation duration and situation awareness,so did the correlation between NNI fixation index and situation awareness.Therefore average fixation duration and NNI fixation index are two useful eye movement measurement indexes that can be used for measuring tower control situation awareness.However,there was no significant correlation between subjects' other eye movement indexes and situation awareness.