Abstract
There is a growing consensus concerning the negative consequences of inappropriate workload on employee’s health and the safety of persons. In a simulator study, we focused on air traffic controllers during arrival management tasks. Our aim was to find out if the number of aircraft or the occurrence of an exceptional event added load to the subjectively experienced workload. The workload was assessed using the NASA-TLX, instantaneous self-assessment (ISA) questionnaire, and expert ratings. Our sample consisted of 21 subjects. According to standard ANOVA procedures, controllers’ subjective ratings showed a high-significant discrimination between the different air traffic demands but only a weak-significant discrimination between sessions with and without event. In particular, we were not able to obtain a significant interaction effect between traffic volume and event. However, the examination of between-subject factors could reveal additional information about controller’s rating behavior. We currently conclude that while the effect of the number of aircraft was evident, the impact of an exceptional event remained doubtful.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Kerstin Ruta for her daily operational support, Emilia Cheladze for conducting the experiments, the numerous pseudo pilots for their contribution during the experiments, and Thorsten Mühlhausen for his conceptual, technical, and overall support. We would also like to thank Martin Schütte for his general project support.
More information about the project that acquired our data can be found at http://www.baua.de/DE/Aufgaben/Forschung/Forschungsprojekte/f2402.html.
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T.R. initiated the project and was responsible for the overall conception of the investigation. T.R., A.T., and N.F. developed the research design of the study. A.T. was responsible for the implementation of the simulation scenarios and the overall technical support. L.R. conducted the experiments and acquired the data. L.R. provided computational support for the data analysis with SPSS and graphic editing. The study was supervised by T.R. Data interpretation was performed by T.R. and B.M. The manuscript was written by T.R. Final critical editing was performed by A.T., N.F., and B.M.
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Appendices
A NASA-TLX Questionnaire
B ISA Questionnaire
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Radüntz, T., Fürstenau, N., Tews, A., Rabe, L., Meffert, B. (2019). The Effect of an Exceptional Event on the Subjectively Experienced Workload of Air Traffic Controllers. In: Longo, L., Leva, M. (eds) Human Mental Workload: Models and Applications. H-WORKLOAD 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1012. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14273-5_14
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