Den här rapporten är en utredning och analys av lämpliga arbetsuppgifter och deras nödvändiga verktyg och hjälpmedel för en skiftledare, Watch Supervisor, vid ett framtida center för fjärrstyrda flygledningstorn, Remote Tower. Ett center för fjärrstyrda flygledningstorn är en centraliserad enhet med uppgiften att flygleda och kontrollera flygsäkerheten på och nära en eller flera flygplatser. Utgångspunkten för datainsamlingen har varit intervjuer med verksamma flygledare och skiftledare på LFV, Sveriges statliga verk för flygtrafiktjänst. Studiebesök har även gjorts vid olika enheter, både flygledartorn och radarkontrollcentraler, däribland Sundsvall RTC som är världens första central för fjärrstyrd flygledning godkänd att sättas i drift. Insamlad data har kompilerats och analyserats och en rekommendation presenteras i slutet av denna rapport angående arbetsuppgifter och verktyg för ovan nämnda skiftledare i ett RTC. Resultatet visar att rollen kommer ha stora likheter med befintliga skiftledarpositioner i den svenska flygledningen.

Today, many small aerodromes have a hard time surviving economically, and amongst the largest cost is air traffic control. Airlines are cutting costs where they can, and many times this affects the aerodromes as well, e.g. when airlines decide to park remotely instead of at the gate. The project called Remotely Operated Towers, initiated by SESAR and run by Saab and LFV, is aiming to address this problem. The project revolves around remotely providing ATS to aerodromes where it is deemed suitable. A big challenge in this project is how to assign aerodromes to remote tower modules in the remote control centre. There are many ways to do this, but there is only a few ways to do it to achieve the least amount of modules. This thesis aims to find an optimal solution to the challenge mentioned above. The thesis resulted in a model where the user can provide the input of choice, i.e. aerodromes with associated ATS operating hours and movements, for a specific period – and receive the assignment schedule for the modules, saying exactly which aerodrome are to be controlled by which module at what time.

Air traffic control and how it is organized is about to change. In Sweden, the Air Traffic Navigation Services (Luftfartsverket) together with SAAB have developed an alternative to traditional air traffic control; Remote Tower Services (RTS). RTS means that a digital tower with multiple cameras is placed at the airport instead of a traditional air traffic control tower. The air traffic controllers control the traffic via a Remote Tower Center (RTC), often situated several miles from the airport. 2015, as the first country in the world, the Air Traffic Navigation Services together with SAAB launched RTS in Sweden at Örnsköldsviks airport which operates from a RTC in Sundsvall. In the forthcoming years RTS is about to be implemented at four Swedish airports. Using Everett Rogers theory of diffusion and theories of public-private partnership this paper examines RTS as an innovation. The study is based on qualitative interviews with representatives from the Air Traffic Navigation Services, Swedavia and Swedish Pilot Association.The study shows that RTS as an innovation can be seen as a consequence of the deregulation of the air traffic control market in 2010 whereas digitalization is another contributing factor. The study also shows that the implementation of RTS can be seen as unilateral. There have been deliberative elements with municipalities and other actors but some of these elements have been symbolic.

The aviation industry evolves all the time in every possible sphere with new the technology that is advancing and the increasing amount of traffic on the airports. The air traffic control services has come a long way with automated systems and more advanced technology and the work of the air traffic controller (ATCO) has become more efficient to meet the higher demands for more traffic. But along with highly automated systems and work efficiency there can be a lack of safety instead if there is too much to do for the controller. A new concept in the aviation industry is developing; multiple remote towers, which means that one ATCO can be several miles away from the airports and handle two or more airports at the same time from the same work station. The air traffic controllers has to monitor the aircrafts, direct the traffic, make decisions and make sure that the pilots follows the instructions. At the same time the ATCO need to monitor the systems as well, making sure that everything is working as it is supposed to. To be able to maintain a safe environment for the controllers and the aircrafts, on and surrounding the runways, the controllers need to have situation awareness and the system they are working within need to be resilient to be able to cope with the different kind of situations that might occur. This study has focused on the role of the ATCO in air traffic control towers and by eye-tracking mapped what the controllers are looking at while handling arrivals in two different air traffic control towers. An episode analysis was made on several episodes that took place during different kinds of conditions in the two different air traffic control tower simulators, one single tower simulator and one multiple remote tower simulator. Patterns in the controllers’ way of handling arrivals were identified and the results from the controllers’ eye-movements shows that the ATCOs have a habitual behaviour pattern and that for almost every arrival they will act in the same way. The ATCO in the single tower simulator used the air radar several times during the episodes while in the multiple remote tower simulator the ATCOs almost never looked at the air radar. The radio was used more by the controllers in the multiple remote tower than in the single tower and it is discussed if this is something that can take too much time from an ATCO in a multiple remote tower. The results also highlights the importance of the strip-table, a tool used by the controllers during every step of the arrival process. The conclusions are that the system (controllers and non-human agents) has situation awareness and that the air traffic controllers have a clear frame of the situation. The results from this study can be seen as a guideline and a start for further research in this field and for the development of multiple remote towers. Further research should investigate in the controllers’ ability of reframing in situations of runway incursions and other unexpected events and the usage of the radio in multiple remote towers.

Saab has a product, Remote Tower, which allows air traffic controllers to supervise and control an airport remotely. Today an air traffic controller can operate on one airport at the time and switch between airports. The next phase of this system is to allow the air traffic controller to simultaneously control multiple airports, i.e. going from controlling airports in sequence to controlling airports in parallel. The airports are connected to and controlled from one single airport control center. This leads to a planning problem, both in long term and short term, for staffing this airport control center to maintain the capacity of the connected airports. This thesis will present the process of the development of a tool allowing a user to plan the schedule the staffing of a remote tower center. By utilizing this tool the impact of different restrictions affecting the planning will be evaluated and presented in the results.

Applying machine learning techniques for real-time detection and tracking of objects in very high-resolution video is a problem that has not been extensively studied. In this thesis, the practical uses of object detection for airport remote towers are explored. We present a Kalman filter-based tracking framework for low-latency aircraft tracking in very high-resolution video streams. The object detector was trained and tested on a dataset containing 3000 labelled images of aircrafts taken at Swedish airports, reaching an mAP of 90.91% with an average IoU of 89.05% on the test set. The tracker was benchmarked on remote tower video footage from Örnsköldsvik and Sundsvall using slightly modified variants of the MOT-CLEAR and ID metrics for multiple object trackers, obtaining an IDF1 score of 91.9%, and a MOTA score of 83.3%. The prototype runs the tracking pipeline on seven high resolution cameras simultaneously at 10 Hz on a single thread, suggesting large potential speed gains being attainable through parallelization.

The Multiple Remote Tower Center concept (mRTC) is a cutting edge project which allows one air traffic control officer (ATCO) to be in charge of multiple remotely situated airports simultaneously. When implemented, it will revolutionise how air traffic is managed at smaller airports and allow for increased efficiency and decreased operational costs. Consequently, at the time of writing a lot of effort is going into evaluating this new way of air traffic management from a safety perspective. Air traffic management has been defined as an issue maintaining situational awareness and exercising control. This thesis aims to investigate how the phenomenon target fascination affects the ATCOs ability to exercise control over its controlled airspace and maintain its situation awareness. It does so by creating a baseline scenario of work in a mRTC, and then comparing the ATCOs performance in the baseline scenario with its performance in the same corresponding scenario, but with elements of target fascination introduced. The differences in the scenarios are analysed using the Contextual Control Model, the Extended Control Model and a holistic framework for studying situation awareness. The analysis shows that target fascination does affect the ATCOs ability to maintain control, but not radically so, and only for a short period of time. The target fascination forces the ATCO to rely on information in the immediate environment to a higher degree than during regular work, as opposed to making decisions based on a holistic understanding of the situation and high level goals. However, once the understanding of the situation have been re-established, the level of control quickly returns to normal levels. Situation awareness is thus a key concept in maintaining control. The situation awareness analysis show that target fascination affects situation awareness by causing the ATCOs understanding of the situation to become outdated without the ATCOs knowledge. Because of this, there may be developments in the situation that the ATCO is not aware of, which hinders it from acting as it normally would. In some cases an intervention from an external actor or element may be necessary to break the fascination and re-establish the ATCOs understanding for the situation. As soon as the fascination is broken, the ATCO quickly takes steps to re-establish its situation awareness and return to normal operations.

Air traffic services (ATS) play an important role for flight safety. Remote air traffic services (RATS) represent a novel, more digitalized, ATS solution. In some aspects, RATS can be argued to outperform conventional ATS. However, as it entails various sociotechnical obstacles, making RATS the dominant solution for ATS is challenging. An inadequate awareness of such sociotechnical obstacles potentially impedes the competitiveness of RATS in general and the RATS providers in particular. This study intends to - from a sociotechnical perspective - identify main obstacles as faced by RATS when aspiring to become the dominant solution for ATS. In order to identify such obstacles, an abductive case study has been conducted. Empirical data was primarily gathered by semi-structured interviews with 10 key stakeholders involved, directly or indirectly, with RATS. The study is delimited to principally gather empirics from Sweden and the United Kingdom. Theoretical concepts of Large Technical Systems (LTS) and the Multilevel Perspective (MLP) are employed to understand and analyze the empirical data. The identified obstacles faced by RATS are mapped into the different levels of the MLP. Obstacles have been identified in all levels of the MLP. The most prominent obstacles seem to lay in social aspects of change processes, a proposition-perception gap, and connectivity infrastructure dependency. / Flygtrafiktjänster (ATS) spelar en viktig roll för flygsäkerhet. Fjärrstyrda flygtrafiktjänster (RATS) representerar en ny, i högre grad digitaliserad, lösning för ATS. I vissa avseenden kan RATS anses prestera bättre än konventionellt utförda flygtrafiktjänster. Vägen mot ett tillstånd där RATS är den dominerande lösningen för RATS är dock kantad av olika sociotekniska utmaningar. En otillräcklig medvetenhet om dessa utmaningar kan potentiellt minska konkurrenskraften för RATS i allmänhet och för utvecklare av RATS i synnerhet. Denna studie syftar till att, från ett sociotekniskt perspektiv, identifiera utmaningar som RATS står inför i, en situation där RATS ämnar ta steg mot att bli den dominerande lösningen för ATS. För att identifiera sådana utmaningar har en abduktiv fallstudie utförts. Empirisk data samlades huvudsakligen in genom semi-strukturerade intervjuer med 10 intressenter, direkt eller indirekt involverade, i RATS. Studien är avgränsad till att huvudsakligen samla in empirisk data från Sverige och Storbritannien. Teoretiska ramverk och begrepp beträffande Large Technical Systems (LTS) och Multilevel Perspective (MLP) används för att förstå och analysera empirisk data. De identifierade utmaningarna kopplas till de olika nivåerna i MLP. Utmaningar har identifierats i alla nivåer av MLP, och de mest framstående utmaningarna tycks ligga i sociala aspekter av förändringsprocesser, ett gap mellan proposition och perception, samt ett beroende av uppkopplingsinfrastruktur.