An agent-based infrastructure for monitoring aviation pilot´s situation awareness

It has been widely documented that at least 70% of commercial aviation incidents in the last 15 years are to be ascribed to human errors, although that is to be linked together with the difficulties in interactions with the ever more complexity of modern planes. Therefore there has been an enormous increase in avionics and on-board systems which, taken one by one, should increase safety, but on the other hand, often without considerations for the ergonomics of the interfaces used, the whole system leads to an overall increase in the workload and a compromise of the global situation awareness. To tackle this problem, in this paper we present the model of an infrastructure which integrates intelligent agents in order to monitor in real time the attention paid by aviation pilots during training/operative flight missions, to make the decision process easier and increase Situation Awareness (SA). To achieve this goal, from the methodological point of view, in our work we proceed reversing the terms of the problem. In other words, we use the most advanced technology to build an agents-based infrastructure to interpret the reality in which the pilot is set. The model of the infrastructure, we call Situation Awareness Monitoring Infrastructure (SAMI), is based on distributed agents, that cooperating with each other act like a virtual co-pilot in order to augment capabilities of the real pilot, enhancing his SA, and to maintain and recover pro-actively his attention. Starting from an event actually occurred, a case study scenario is given to prove the enhancement given by SAMI in pilot´s SA and thus in flight safety.