In the airline industry, safety is driven by how well air traffic is managed and how well people work together to make decisions. Quite a few decisions have been made based on how well pilots can communicate with automated systems.
When the situation calls for it, pilots and operators in general have to decide when to step in and use systems by hand. When they use automated systems, they have to do more monitoring, which makes it more likely that they will make a mistake. For example, Boeing came under a lot of scrutiny after two fatal accidents involving its Max jet between 2018 and 2019. Pilots were not taught how to use MCAS, the new automated system. Because the pilots hadn’t been trained on the new technology, they couldn’t turn off the system, which caused the plane to crash and kill people.
Based on interviews with engineers, operators, and managers, we know that controllers often turn off automated systems during busy times because it gets too hard to run the transportation network. Even though controllers are trained to deal with a wide range of situations, they don’t all handle them the same way. Most of the time, younger controllers use the automated systems more than their older peers. Companies would like to use technology more so that they can save money on costs. But decisions must take into account many things, such as how safe it is and how much work the operators have to do.
In the health care field, where the interaction between people and technology is very important to manage, there are a lot of situations like this. For example, in operating rooms, doctors, nurses, and other important people need to know what’s going on and have a reasonable amount of mental work to do in order to manage automated systems well. Such systems have the potential to stop a lot of potentially dangerous things from happening, but if they aren’t well-designed, they may actually cause more problems instead of preventing them. This is especially true when automation makes the human’s role mostly supervisory. Building on the LEAP-HI grant, Triantis has reached out to get money for a “seed grant” to work with MEDSTAR in Northern Virginia and Carilion in Roanoke to learn more about these issues.
Since Triantis’ dissertation was finished 40 years ago, the researcher has been trying to combine different fields to solve social problems in a more complete way.
Triantis said, “Our work has become more and more interdisciplinary.” “Not just with figuring out how to measure the effects of investments in technology, but also with the well-known problem of figuring out how to combine social networks and how people use them with changes in technology. We are trying to figure out how certain theoretical paradigms and different modeling methods can be used to solve complex problems in society. As a Ph.D. student, I couldn’t really explain the idea of multidisciplinary research and how different approaches apply to different fields. How some of the theory fits with the real world.”
One goal of this project is to reach out to a wide range of students and get them interested in LEAP HI-related fields, especially if they are interested in STEM. Triantis will work directly with Virginia Tech’s Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity on outreach activities to get students in grades 7–12 interested by sharing simulator decision-making challenges, the effect of distributed situational awareness, and how fatigue affects decision-making.
The information from this work will help infrastructure providers, like railroads, airlines, trucking, maritime, and pipeline controllers, and regulators, like the Federal Railroad Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Federal Transit Administration in the United States, make better design and policy decisions. The framework is an important piece of information for engineers, especially safety regulators who work with infrastructure systems that are run by automation.
