Facilitating synchronous collaboration among distributed agents in the air traffic management system: a descriptive study

Work today is more cognitive than ever before. Workers participate in more teams and interact with more people having diverse expertise. This allows for multiple skills and perspectives to be brought to bear on problem-solving situations. With these changes arises the need to explore how people with different levels of expertise and diverse knowledge actually work together in the course of their “inter-situated.” activities. The emerging technologies to support collaborative work have the potential to enhance not only the effectiveness of intra-organizational teams but also interorganizational collaborative teams. A rich example of inter-organizational cognitive teamwork can be found in the United States AirTraffic Management (ATM) System. The ATM System is an ongoing and dynamic distributed cognitive system with tremendously high stakes. Because of the cognitive complexity of managing the NAS, tasks are decomposed in a way that limits the amount of data and knowledge that each individual needs in order to do his or her work. When this assumption of task independence is inadequate, however, it is necessary for the responsible individuals to interact. An example of this is pre-flight planning, which is rapidly increasing fn the extent to which there is task interdependence among FAA traffic management staff and airline dispatch staff. As a result, there is a great need to develop effective methods for both groups to gather and synthesize data and to work coUaboratively decide how to act.