Human factors in collaborative traffic flow management based on composite information space

Air traffic flow management (ATFM) system is a very complex system, in which many tasks strongly rely on human operators, especially on teams of operators or organizations, e.g. controllers, pilot and airlines. For better system performance, human behaviors must be taken into account. In this paper, the composite information space (CIS) is introduced, which deals with human factors and environment factors, and a composite information model is also proposed. Based on CIS, this paper focuses on human factors in ATFM system, in particular, the collaborative activity (cooperation or coordination amongst human operators) in the systems, and the concept of collaborative traffic flow management (CTFM) is introduced accordingly. The impacts of human factors on system reliability are analyzed at the end of this paper.