Functional Allocation with Airborne Self-Separation Evaluated in a Piloted Simulation

A human-in-the-loop simulation experiment was designed and conducted to evaluate an airborne self-separation concept. The activity supports the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) research focus on function allocation for separation assurance. The objectives of the experiment were twofold: (1) use experiment design features in common with a companion study of ground-based automated separation assurance to promote comparability, and (2) assess agility of selfseparation operations in managing trajectorychanging events in high traffic density, en-route operations with arrival time constraints. This paper describes the experiment and presents initial results associated with subjective workload ratings and group discussion feedback obtained from the experiment’s commercial transport pilot participants.

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