A theoretical approach to management of limited attentional resources to support m:N operation in advanced air mobility ecosystem
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Advanced air mobility (AAM) technologies incorporate increasingly autonomous systems that allow fully remote, independent, and intelligent operation of air vehicles to support the transportation of goods and passengers within and across urban and rural areas. In the AAM ecosystem, the human operator's role will likely be a passive supervisory monitor of the air vehicles, involving increasingly fewer humans (m) that manage many more autonomous systems (N), or m:N operations. In the general human information-processing model, a human operator exercises a limited pool of attentional resources to engage various information-processing stages. Yamani and Horrey (2018) expanded the human information-processing model to characterize a tradeoff between information-processing demand and resource relief that automation brings in the context of automated driving. In their model, a driver interacting with an automated driving system is assumed to reallocate resources “freed” by automation to support other information-processing stages required for successful task performance. A future AAM ecosystem enabled by an orchestration of advanced automated systems, however, requires a single operator to interact with more than one air vehicle with varying levels and degrees of automation. We provide a review of the literature on situation assessment and trust, two constructs identified as critical for a fuller understanding of intimate and intricate interactions between a human operator and multiple air vehicles equipped with increasingly autonomous systems. Then, we propose an expansion of Yamani and Horrey's (2018) model to motivate systematic research on the human operator's role, identify factors that influence resource allocation, and guide human-centered design of an interface supporting the m:N operation in the AAM environment.
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This chapter, along with the full text, can also be found online at ScienceDirect: https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780443292460/interdependent-human-machine-teams