Abstract

One major limitation of developing cognitive computing cockpit supporting tools to maintain the pilots’ workload between acceptable lower and upper thresholds is the time variability of humans to perform a well-trained action in a dynamic environment. There are several human factors related issues such as fatigue, stress and workload among others that are reported as the major contributor to human performance variability. Without a deep understanding of the mechanisms that affect pilot performance during the different phases of flight, any support such as a recommended action to improve aircraft stability can affect as an interruption to current cockpit task that increments the workload, forcing pilots to comprehend the consequences of the proposed actions and take a decision about accepting or rejecting the recommendation. This paper presents a socio-technical approach to understand the causes of a degraded mode pilot performance while providing a simulation framework to predict the time windows at which supporting tools could be fired to lessen the pilot workload.