Airport surface management as a distributed supervisory control task

This paper outlines design concepts that approach airport surface management as a distributed supervisory control system. It emphasizes the need to both distribute the management tasks among a number of different Stakeholders and to support supervisory control by human operators at different levels of abstraction in order to deal with the full range of relevant scenarios and distributed tasks. More specifically, the discussion uses a concrete scenario to describe conceptual solutions to support more effective supervisory control, and illustrates design concepts consistent with these conceptual solutions.