Applying Cognitive Engineering Principles to Allocation of Roles and Responsibilities for a Future Air Traffic Management Concept

NASA’s Management by Trajectory (MBT) concept will improve trajectory predictability by providing methods to keep aircraft on negotiated trajectories; however, the concept impacts roles and responsibilities. Most notably, MBT envisions a different distribution of responsibilities between the Radar-side and Data-side (herein called the negotiating) controllers. Cognitive engineering provides a rich history of research into understanding the roles that humans and automation play in complex systems and some principles for system design. This paper briefly summarizes this literature, focusing on principles underlying the proposed allocation of responsibilities in MBT and the source of automation and information requirements.