The Organizational Response to Automation Support Degradation. Identifying Air Traffic Control Sources of Resilience in Cases of Radar Loss

Controllers working in Area Control Centres are supported by highly automated multi-radar tracking system displaying air traffic at different working positions. The automation provides and selects for the controllers the most relevant information associated to each aircraft and assists them while they issue instructions to pilots. But, what happens when the automation fails? These rare situations represent an example of abrupt transition from a highly automated to a severely degraded mode of operation. Exploring sources of resilience during this critical loss from highly automated tasks allows to better understand the effects of automation in a complex transportation system. Safety management and business continuity considerations were made during the DARWIN project whose goal is the development of resilience management guidelines for critical infrastructures. A specific part of the DARWIN resilience management guideline was applied to a loss of radar information scenario, based on the experience of a real event occurred in a European Area Control Centre, in order to assess the resilience responses to automation degradation. The DARWIN guideline concepts supported the identification of individual and organisational resilience mechanisms that allowed the Area Control Centre to operate in a severely degraded mode, with no negative effects on the safety and a very limited impact on the business continuity. Similar adaptive capacity mechanisms can be adopted, for analogy, in other critical transportation infrastructures that aim to achieve highly automated functionalities in the management of assisted human-machine interactions