AISA - AI Situational Awareness Foundation for Advancing Automation

This proposal addresses the topic “Digitalisation and Automation principles for ATM”. Automation is one of the mostpromising solutions for the capacity problem, however, to implement advanced automation concepts it is required thatthe AI and human are able to share the situational awareness. Exploring the effect of, and opportunities for, distributedhuman-machine situational awareness in en-route ATC operations is one of the main objectives of this project. Insteadof automating isolated individual tasks, such as conflict detection or coordination, we propose building a foundationfor automation by developing an intelligent situationally-aware system. Sharing the same team situational awarenessamong ATCO team members and AI will enable the automated system to reach the same conclusions as ATCOs whenconfronted with the same problem and to be able to explain the reasoning behind those conclusions. The challengesof transparency and generalization will be solved by combining machine learning with reasoning engine (includingdomain-specific knowledge graphs) in a way that emphasizes their advantages. Machine learning will be used forprediction, estimation and filtering at the level of individual probabilistic events, an area where it has so far showngreat prowess, whereas reasoning engine will be used to represent knowledge and draw conclusions based on allthe available data and explain the reasoning behind those conclusions. We will explore to what extent it is possibleto deduce machine learning false estimates and how resilient such system is to failure. In this way, the artificialsituational awareness system will be the enabler of future advanced automation based on machine learning. Keywords:Human-Systems Integration, Automation, Artificial Situational Awareness, Team Situational Awareness, Reasoning, KnowledgeGraph, Machine Learning, Ontology, Air Traffic Control, Air Traffic Management DOI: https://doi.org/10.3030/892618