Aiding Planning in Air Traffic Control: An Experimental Investigation of the Effects of Perceptual Information Integration

Earlier research studied how controllers plan in their traditional environment and identified various information uncertainties as detriments to planning. A planning aid was designed to reduce this uncertainty by perceptually representing important constraints. This included integrating spatial information on the radar screen with discrete information. Prior research also reported improved planning performance and decreased workload in the planning aid condition. The aim of this paper was to determine the source of these performance improvements. Analysis of computer interactions using log-linear modeling showed that the planning interface led to less repetitive, but more integrated, information retrieval compared with the traditional planning environment. Ecological interface design principles helped explain how the integrated information retrieval gave rise to the performance improvements.