Artificial Intelligence Techniques for the Piloted Approach Decision Aid Logic (PADAL) System

The Landing Signal Officer (LSO) faces many challenges. Although his primary concern remains safety, he must maintain an extremely rapid recovery rate. This dictates small times between each landing, and pressure to not wave-off unless absolutely necessary. LSO's have little time to make the wave-off decision, must wait until the last possible second, and often may not have a good definition of what that last second is. In such a high pressure, high stakes, and highly time constrained environment, Cognitive Science Engineering (CSE) is required to determine the critical decisions and the best methods to support them. In such a complex, time pressured domain, no one technique or paradigm is adequate. Stottler Henke Associates, Inc. (SHAI) plans to utilize a variety of AI techniques. In Phase I we will elicit the required knowledge and criteria from expert LSOs using CSE techniques and absolutely prove the feasibility of our concepts with the implementation and evaluation of a prototype. Our phase I team includes cognitive psychologists with extensive experience in studying experts confronted with judgments and decisions in situations marked by high stakes, time pressure, conflicting requirements and rapidly changing situations; top-notch AI developers; and an experienced LSO and LSO instructor, Frank Pfeiffer.