About the exercise

The exercises  aimed to validate the use of automated assistance to controllers for surface movement planning and routing using data link.

Results

• Surface Planning and Routing functions were found to be beneficial.
• Data link was considered as useful in the context of non-time-critical communications and resulted in reduced voice frequency channel occupancy.
• Routing and data link functions decreased situational awareness and increased the controllers and apron managers’ workload.  
• Human Machine Interface (HMI) was found to be too time-consuming in the manual mode.

Further work is needed to enhance data-link messages and improve the HMI.