The design of cooperative problem-solving systems for flight planning

A prototype system, the Flight Planning Testbed, was developed to study the influence of system design on the planning performance of airline dispatchers. This system is capable of supporting planning at several levels of abstractions. Based on an empirical study of 27 airline dispatchers and a previous study of 30 airline pilots, it is clear that variations in the level of support can have significant effects on performance. In particular, under certain circumstances, automatic suggestions of solutions by the computer can induce very poor decisions