A recent collaboration between the University of York and NATS, the UK's leading provider of air traffic control services, is being shown at NATS’ Virtual Research Collaboration Conference.

The 6-month A2URE project investigated what a suitable methodology for the development and approval of decision-making automation in Air Traffic Control operations would look like. Alongside this, what changes would be required to operational procedures and policies were considered. Nathan Hughes, a third year IGGI student, worked with NATS to produce three reports for the project. The first considered how current safety assurance processes for changes introduced to the Air Traffic Management (ATM) system could be applied to decision-making automation. The second summarised the factors commonly seen in controller-automation interactions. The final report described a new methodology for designing and developing automated decision-making tools, which could  also provide evidence of safety assurance, validation and verification. Alongside these reports, two workshops were run internally to gain feedback from NATS experts, with attendees from the departments of safety assurance, validation, and human performance.

The project aims to support future research into introducing decision-making automation to ATM, including the continued development of procedures and policies as more automation is introduced.

Find link to the project summary here: https://i.nats.aero/rc21/site/automation/a2ure/ and the project's video for the exhibition below:

The exhibition continues until 15 October 2021. Follow this link to access the online venue: https://i.nats.aero/rc21/