Human-in-the-Loop Evaluation of Dynamic Multi-Flight Common Route Advisories

Flights often experience large delays when they are routed around weather. Multi-flight common route advisories provide delay recovery by suggesting time-saving re-routes for groups of flights whose current weather-avoidance routes have become outdated because the weather has dissipated and/or moved away. A laboratory evaluation of these advisories was conducted by four subject matter experts having extensive experience in traffic flow management operations. These experts provided a total of 120 data points in the airspace of Houston Center. The multi-flight common route tool provides time-saving route change advisories taking into account flight plans, wind fields, and the spatio-temporal evolution of predicted convective weather. It is not designed to account for complex operational factors such as non-standard sector traversal and interactions with local traffic management initiatives; hence a relatively low percentage (37%) of advisories generated by the tool were rated as acceptable. However, a high percentage (81%) of advisories were rated as acceptable after the subject matter experts used the tool’s user interface to make route modifications that accounted for relevant operational factors not considered by the tool. The workload associated with using the tool, as measured by the NASA Task Load Index, was quite low (1.1 on a scale of 0 to 10). The results of this evaluation make a good case for human-automation teaming to design operationally valid weather re-routes for delay recovery.