The Situation Radar - Visualizing Collaborative Situation Awareness in Traffic Control Systems

Today, traffic control responsibilities are split among different authorities that operate on a shared environment. Since each authority may have its own restrained views of the environment, collaboration is crucial to better resolve critical traffic situations. As a consequence, traffic control operators have to establish collaborative situation awareness (SA), i.e., they have to correctly judge the meaning and impact of information in their own control center, as well as to keep track of the information status and needs of other operators, their planned and executed actions, and further important details of collaboration. In this paper we discuss requirements on a user interface for collaborative SA. The authors adapt well-practiced visualization patterns to propose the Situation Radar, a user interface element aiming at establishing collaborative SA in traffic control.