The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recently entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with Drexel University.
Drexel's cognitive modeling community and the FAA Human Factors Team located at the FAA's William J. Hughes Technical Center share an interest in better understanding air traffic controller perception, cognition, and motor activity during air traffic control tasks.
To further the understanding of expert air traffic controller behavior, the Human Factors Team will make available data
collected during high fidelity human-inthe-loop simulations.
In return, Drexel will use that data to create and populate a cognitive model of air traffic controllers in ACT-R/PM (Adaptive Control of Thought/Rational/Perception and Motor-control), and interface the ACT-R architecture with FAA's DESIREE (Distributed Environment for Simulation, Rapid Engineering, and Experimentation) high fidelity air traffic control simulator for future stand-alone and human-in-the-loop simulations. ACT-R/PM is an embodied psychological theory developed by Prof. John R. Anderson at Carnegie Mellon University.
The government's Principal Investigator is Ben Willems, who can be reached at 609-485-4191 at the William J. Hughes
Technical Center.
