Evaluating pilot situation awareness using multi-agent systems

Abstract

This paper presents the outcomes of collaborative research between three PhD students working in the Multi-Agent System (MAS), Knowledge-Based System (KBS), and aviation Situation Awareness (SA) domains. The aim of this research was to create a MAS that could be used to monitor pilot SA during flight. SA is a cognitive activity that is a critical function conducted by pilots to maintain knowledge of their environment during flight. Good SA ultimately enhances the safety of passengers by reducing the possibility of pilots contributing to a number of documented catastrophic incidents. A controlled experiment has been devised to enable these students to capture and analyse pilot behaviour in an attempt to passively monitor SA monitoring activities using a camera. The MAS consists of multiple agent capabilities that capture the pilots visual acuity and eye movements. This data is used to assess the perceived cognitive activity in real-time. All agents can communicate and share the knowledge captured in order to analyse the activity based on pattern-matching rules using an embedded KBS. The experiments confirmed it is possible to identify at least three specific behaviours. The agents were able to post-process the acquired data to distinguish significant differences between an expert pilot and trained volunteers.