About the exercise

The exercises  aimed to validate the use of automated assistance to controllers for surface movement planning and routing using data link.

Results

• Surface Planning and Routing functions were found to be beneficial.
• Data link was considered as useful in the context of non-time-critical communications and resulted in reduced voice frequency channel occupancy.
• Routing and data link functions decreased situational awareness. 
• Human Machine Interface (HMI) was found to be too time-consuming in the manual mode.

Further work is needed to enhance data-link messages and improve the HMI. 

About the exercise

The exercises  aimed to validate the use of automated assistance to controllers for surface movement planning and routing using data link.

Results

• Surface Planning and Routing functions were found to be beneficial.
• Data link was considered as useful in the context of non-time-critical communications and resulted in reduced voice frequency channel occupancy.
• Routing and data link functions decreased situational awareness and increased the controllers and apron managers’ workload.  
• Human Machine Interface (HMI) was found to be too time-consuming in the manual mode.

Further work is needed to enhance data-link messages and improve the HMI.