Improving cooperation between Air Traffic Controllers: a design issue

Reaching a high level of mutual awareness and comprehension in ATC electronic environments is usually considered as a challenge. The fact that the cognitive processes involved in the building of shared representations are by essence complex and hidden constitutes one of the trickiest reason of this difficulty among all the others. Thus, not only is the analysis of the current processes involved difficult in a "paper" environment (i.e. with paper strips and radar image) but when it comes to the design of an electronic stripping environment, basing the design on the adaptation of those processes may be difficult if not counterproductive. Actually, as any evolution of the environment modifies the activity in a non-deterministic way, it is quite difficult to anticipate to what extent those processes would remain adequate in an electronic environment. Instead of that option, applying an adapted design methodology may be a way to handle this issue. The purpose of this paper is to take a current instance of the ASTER project (assistant for terminal sectors) initially dedicated to the executive controller, aiming at providing assistance for the terminal sectors, i.e. sectors dealing with traffic inbound or outbound from one or several major airports, and outline the design process. In the first part of the paper, we will briefly introduce the ASTER concept and the VertiDigi HMI product. In a second step, we will focus on the cooperation issue and describe the way the design process was build in order to tackle this issue.