Vertiport Human Automation Teaming Toolbox

Crown Consulting, Inc. in partnership with George Washington University and several industry leading expert consultants in heliport infrastructure propose to develop Vertiport Human Automation Teaming Toolbox (V-HATT). V-HATT is designed for real-time human-in-the-loop simulations for vertiport arrival, surface, and departure operations on the airside of a vertiport. Human-machine teaming is a core component of V-HATT, and the simulation toolbox will be designed to toggle various teaming strategies with differing degrees of automation to examine the teaming relationship performance. The Federal Aviation Administration anticipates the development of future guidance on advanced vertiport operations including autonomy and high tempo facilities. As vertiports grow in capability and complexity, managing operations will require innovative concepts that adapt to scale with vertiport operational complexity. V-HATT will assist researchers, operators, manufacturers, and infrastructure developers to understand realistic operational bottlenecks and vertiport capacity considering human roles.V-HATT can be decomposed by mission phases to illustrate the envisioned system capabilities.Pre-Mission: The Pre-mission phase includes simulation set-up, design, adjusting teaming relationship parameters, vertiport and airspace design, operaitonal rules, selecting weather conditions, and identifying potential off-nominal scenarios.Mission: The Mission phase includes running the simulation with a HITL to try and manage the flow of operations at a vertiport. A human vertiport operator will have controls that allow for scheduling, sequencing, and controlling arrival, surface, and departure traffic to ensure high-throughput operations at the vertiport.Post-Mission: The Post-mission phase includes conducting human factors analysis, conducting bottleneck analysis, and comparing runs to look at the data of how simulation configurations compare.