Effects of transparency on the acceptance of automated resolution advisories

To lower the workload and increase the productivity of air traffic controllers in future scenarios, decision-support systems that functions on a higher level of control authority would be desired. However, increasing the control authority of automation asks for some important considerations in terms of design to ensure effective human-machine coordination. One of the factors that is hypothesized to affect human-machine collaboration, and one that is often overlooked in the design of such systems, is the solution transparency offered by the automated system. That is, when an automated system reveals some of its inner workings, it is expected to promote better system understanding and an increased acceptance of resolution advisories offered by that system. To this end, this paper investigates the effects of automation transparency on the acceptance of automated resolution advisories in conflict detection and resolution task for air traffic controllers. An exploratory experiment, featuring twelve aerospace students, was performed to study these effects. The results indicated that no main effects of transparency on acceptance were found, but also that there was a significant interaction effect between conflict geometry and transparency. For future research, an experiment is proposed with professional air traffic controllers and a larger sample size to increase the power of the statistics.