Agent-based aids to facilitate cockpit task management

In today's highly automated aircraft, the role of the pilot has changed from an airplane controller to a system manager. As a system manager in a cockpit, today's pilot is in charge of a supervisory activity we call cockpit task management (CTM). CTM activities include the initiation, assessment, prioritization, execution, and termination of tasks. This paper describes our past and ongoing efforts to understand CTM and to facilitate it through the use of agent-based, computational aids.