Airspace Operations Lab @ NASA Ames

A human-in-the-loop evaluation of the Operational Airspace Sectorization Integrated System (OASIS) was conducted in the Airspace Operations Laboratory at NASA Ames Research Center. OASIS is an advisory tool built on an Android touch tablet, designed to assist Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) En Route Area Supervisors in their planning of sector combine/split operations as well as opening/closing of radar associate control positions over the subsequent two hours. During the experiment, eight retired FAA personnel served as participants for a part-task evaluation of the OASIS user interface and the underlying mathematical algorithm that provided the advisories. There were three experimental conditions: Baseline, Computer Recommend Plan (CRP), and User Generated Plan (UGP). In the Baseline condition, participants were presented with four different traffic scenarios and were asked to generate their own sector configuration plan solutions without OASIS. In the CRP condition, they evaluated the multiple advisory solutions that were generated by OASIS. In the UGP condition, they modified the OASIS advisory solutions to make their own solutions with the support of the OASIS tool. The participants considered the OASIS advisory solutions at least as good as their own, suggesting that the underlying algorithm provided good solutions for the Area Supervisors. In the UGP condition, the participants could not improve on the OASIS advisories by further tweaking the solutions. Participants gave positive feedback on both the user interface and the algorithm solutions, including an excellent average rating above 90% on the tool usability scales. They also suggested various enhancements to be incorporated into the next tool development cycle. The development of OASIS is a major activity of the Dynamic Airspace Configuration (DAC) research focus area within the Airspace Systems Program.