ACROSS: Scope and State of the Art

This document is the Deliverable D1.1-1 Scope and State of the Art of ACROSS, a European 7th Framework EC funded project. The main purposes of ACROSS are: To develop, integrate and test new cockpit solutions that acilitate the management of the peak workload situations that can occur during a flight, in order to improve safety and ensure the reduction of accident risks through the reduction of stress; To develop, integrate and test new cockpit solutions that will allow reduced crew operations in a limited number of well-defined conditions; · To identify the remaining open issues for the implementation of single pilot operations, taking into account first learning about evaluations done on workload reduction and reduced crew operations. This document details the goals of the ACROSS project and collects the state of the art in technology, procedures and regulations, as well as human aspects related to workload for basic operations (two pilots in the cockpit), reduced crew operations (single-pilot situation for long haul flights) and incapacitated crew situations. It starts out with a chapter on the scope of the project, which includes the operational context of today’s civil aviation environment (introducing basic and reduced crew operations), with different situations: nominal and abnormal, including incapacitated crew. Reduced crew and incapacitated crew are defined based on literature and state of the art research results. A review of basic cognitive concepts relevant for ACROSS is done in chapter 2. Workload, stress, situation awareness, automation, human error, and other relevant constructs, are described. Chapter 3 describes human, organizational and operational aspects of monitoring technology. This section focuses on risk in aviation and potential challenges with respect to detecting stress fatigue and incapacitation with respect to ergonomic factors. In Chapter 4, causes for high workload are identified in normal conditions as well as in reduced crew situations. Contributions of technology to high workload are pointed out and collected. Chapter 5 then collects the state of the art in technology that is used for the abolishment and reduction of workload at the time of the start of the ACROSS project. The incapacitated crew perspective is inherently different from reduced and nominal crew. In an incapacitated crew situation, there will not be any workload on the human and therefore, the incapacitated crew part is structurally separated from the rest and presented in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 identifies areas for improvement that can be envisioned with respect to the state-of-the art in workload reduction. Chapter 8 provides an overview of the relevant rules and regulations pertaining to workload, reduced crew and incapacitated situation.