Name Surname's Phd Thesis
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Università degli Studi di Firenze Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione (DINFO) Corso di Dottorato in Ingegneria dell’Informazione Curriculum: Telematica e Società dell’Informazione SSD M-PSI/01 Concepts of multimodal interactions to support Human Performance in Remote Tower Operations Candidate Rosa De Piano Supervisors Prof. Patrizia Marti Dr. Luca Save PhD Coordinator Prof. Luigi Chisci 1 Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Engineering. Copyright © 2017 by Rosa De Piano. 2 Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................................... 10 The embodied reMOte TOwer ......................................................................................................... 10 1. Context of the research ......................................................................................................... 11 1.1 The MOTO project ........................................................................................................... 18 1.2 The PhD study ................................................................................................................. 24 Chapter 2 .......................................................................................................................................... 37 The agent’s body in a multisensory system .................................................................................... 37 2.1 Embodied cognition ........................................................................................................ 38 2.2 Multisensory perception .......................................................................................... 48 2.3 The multimodal experience of the body in the space ...................................... 53 2.4 Multimodality in Air Traffic Management domain .......................................... 60 Chapter 3 .......................................................................................................................................... 66 Remote Tower Control ....................................................................................................................... 66 3.1 The Out of the window tower control ............................................................................. 67 3.1.1 Roles and responsibilities ........................................................................................... 68 3.2 A new operational concept: the Remote Tower Operation ........................... 73 3.2.1 Single Remote Tower ............................................................................................ 76 3.2.2 Multiple Remote Tower .................................................................................... 81 3.2.3 Remote Tower Centre (RTC) ......................................................................................88 3.2.4 Single and Multiple Remote Tower ............................................................................ 90 Chapter 4 .......................................................................................................................................... 98 Exploratory concepts of innovative solutions for remote control ................................................. 98 4.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 99 4.2 Objectives ....................................................................................................................... 100 4.1 Design process ............................................................................................................... 102 4.1.1 Step 1 – Problem setting ........................................................................................... 104 4.1.2 Step 2 – Concept generation ..................................................................................... 185 4.1.3 Step 3 – Concept development ................................................................................ 204 Chapter 5 ........................................................................................................................................ 219 3 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 219 5.1 Summary of contribution ............................................................................................. 220 5.2 Directions for future work ............................................................................................ 225 Appendix A ..................................................................................................................................... 227 Appendix B .................................................................................................................................... 230 Appendix C ..................................................................................................................................... 238 Appendix D ..................................................................................................................................... 247 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................... 251 Webliography ................................................................................................................................. 259 Publications ..................................................................................................................................... 261 4 Abstract Context - This thesis deals with the development of exploratory concepts of multimodal interactions able to support the Human Performance (HP) of Tower (TWR) Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs) from a remote tower, during the traffic management on the area under their responsibility. Nowadays the TWR Controllers’ job consists in the management of the aircraft and vehicles movements on the runways and taxiways of an airport and they perform their tasks with the Out-The-Window (OTW) view, which means that they look at the vehicles without using any screens, but directly looking outside of the tower building windows, especially in small and medium airports. In recent years, a new operational concept emerged in aviation: the Remote Tower Operations (RTOs). The motivation of the growth of this new concept is the current European situation of small and medium density airports that often have to face the difficulties and the high costs for the provision of a safe and efficient Air Traffic Service (ATS). Many of these airports act as public service routes for isolated communities and their importance is increasing with the expansion of low-cost airlines; for these reasons, in order to avoid the risk of closed down these airports and with the aim to maintain an adequate level of safety and efficiency, several European countries are in process of developing remote tower management for small and medium density airports. The idea behind is that in the new remote working environment, the Tower ATCO will no longer perform his/her tasks from a local aerodrome but from a distant position. According to the European guidelines that are being developed to define the technical and operational requirements of the Remote Tower system, it is supposed that the TWR ATCOs will monitor the traffic mainly through the implementation of high definition cameras, including also radar screens and radio transmission, instead of the OTW. In addition to the visual information, the aerodrome outdoor sound is also taken into consideration for the development of the Control Working Position (CWP) support tools, without any mention to data collected through other sensory modalities. 5 The PhD work has been carried out in the framework of a European project called MOTO (The embodied reMOte TOwer), which considering the above-mentioned context and the theories of multisensory interaction and embodied cognition, explores the possibility to improve human performance in RTOs. The multisensory concept and the embodied cognition, which study the feeling and the modalities humans use to interact with the environment, have been considered as the theoretical context to achieve a full understanding on how controllers use all of their senses during every day operations, in order to improve the situation awareness and to decrease the workload. This approach offers the advantage of analysing complex human behaviours during natural interactions in real-world environments and in enriched simulations of the real world. Approach and activities - In order to investigate the role of embodied cognition in TWR ATCO, and thus to explore the design of concepts of multimodal technologies for Remote Tower Operations, a design process have been carried out as the main activity of this thesis. Starting from the embodied cognition and the multisensory integration, the approach of the activity on the concepts design analyses how the development of multimodal solutions, able to support the Human Performance in the Remote Tower Operations, can lead to the elicitation of new operational and user’s needs. With regard to the approach used for the purpose of the design process, it has been adopted