Abstract
Air traffic controllers’ fatigue on duty affect their performance and even threaten aviation safety. But the design and promotion of air traffic management systems seldom consider dynamic changes of fatigue for controllers on duty. The aim of this study was to detect changes of fatigue for controllers on duty along with different task loads and working schedules. Fatigue influence sleep, mood and perception of controllers, and the three kinds of index employed to characterize their fatigue. A field investigation with 3 × 4 levels of two factors including task load and working schedule was carried out at one busy area control unit in China. 156 effective questionnaires (52 person times) were collected and analyzed with statistical methods. Primary results of repeated measure variance analysis showed that the accumulation of task load resulted in their sleep subscale scores increased very significantly, mood subscale scores and perception subscale scores decreased very significantly. Results of independent measure variance analysis showed that the influence of working schedule was also very significant to their sleep subscale, mood subscale and perception subscale scores. And the results of multiple factors covariance analysis showed that the interaction of task load and working schedule was significant. These primary results need to verify with large number of samples. These results clearly indicated that air traffic controllers’ fatigue dynamically changed on duty. And the results will promote the design of new smart and adaptive air traffic management system which should take the dynamical change of controllers' fatigue and even capacity in to account.
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Acknowledgement
We would like to thank all air traffic controllers who participated in this study. This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52072406 and No. 22074157), Safety Foundation of Civil Aviation Administration of China (No. [2020]116), and Chengdu Science and Technology Project (2020-XT00–00001-GX).
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Chen, Z. et al. (2021). A Preliminary Field Study of Air Traffic Controllers’ Fatigue for Interface Design. In: Harris, D., Li, WC. (eds) Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12767. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77932-0_10
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