**5. Conclusions and Future Work**

The study of human factors in aviation integrates the human component with the advanced technology used in air traffic management.

Within this discipline, the use of real-time simulations presents many advantages, including the ability to design exercises with known ATC events and the ability to study their influence on the response of air traffic controllers.

This line of research aims to establish capacity models that consider the neurophysiological variables recorded during the development of ad hoc real-time simulation exercises designed for the project.

The problem is that, in order to develop a detailed and valid study of these variables, it is necessary to compare their evolution with a valid taskload profile, which represents the actual difficulty faced by the participant during performance of the exercises.

The results of this study show that the two initial hypotheses were correct. In this experiment, a methodology has been established to define an event-based taskload profile that is suitable for studying the evolution of neurophysiological variables. The future objective is to extrapolate the study to the real operation of a control unit.

It has been demonstrated that, in the case of the data analysed in this study, the subjective workload values obtained after implementing the ISA method on the platform have been a good intermediate tool for assessing the suitability of considering the different taskload profiles as a reference. In this paper, the methodology that was followed to obtain this reference taskload has been presented, as well as the main conclusions obtained after comparing the actual taskload profile obtained to the subjective workload values assessed by the participants.

From analysis of the designed taskload profile and the subjective workload values, it has been shown that the designed taskload profile of the exercises is not the best baseline for studying the combinations of events that generate the greatest difficulty. To solve this problem, a methodology has been defined to obtain the actual event-based taskload profile.

This reference will be used in later research investigating the behaviour of neurophysiological variables related to brain activity and eye-tracking.

When comparing the actual profile to subjective workload assessments, it is possible to explain values that previously seemed unusual. By being aware of the events occurring in each minute of the simulation, it is possible to draw a number of general conclusions about the difficulty of the events perceived by the participants.


The results obtained meet the objectives defined in the study and have allowed the establishment of a methodology that can be used to obtain the actual taskload profile of each participant, which can subsequently be used to compare the evolution of neurophysiological variables. On the basis of these findings, the following future work is defined:


Two main limitations of the work presented in this paper have been identified:


Future work will be organised in order to address these two limitations. The first set of participants was reduced so that the methodology could be validated before extending the study to a larger group. As demonstrated in this work, the methodology has been validated. Therefore, a simulation campaign has already been carried out that involves a larger number of participants. Work is currently in progress to review videos of the simulations and to determine the taskload profiles of what happened in the simulations according to the methodology described in this paper.

In this first stage of the process, ATCO students have been selected as participants with the aim of investing as much time as possible in the simulator. Through these tests with students, the idea was to obtain a methodology and relationships between ATC events and neurophysiological variables, as well as to be able to carry out a multitude of tests with the data obtained. Based on all the experience accumulated with the ATCO students' simulations, the data collection and analysis process will already be optimised. Once the results obtained are sufficiently robust, the next step is to replicate the experiment with ATCOs in service or participants with operational experience. This phase of the study will be developed in close collaboration with CRIDA.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, M.Z.S. and R.M.A.V.; methodology, M.Z.S. and V.F.G.C.; software, M.Z.S., F.P.M. and R.D.-A.J.; validation, R.M.A.V., F.P.M., P.M.L.d.F. and V.F.G.C.; data curation, M.Z.S. and P.M.L.d.F.; writing—original draft preparation, M.Z.S.; writing—review and editing, R.M.A.V., P.M.L.d.F. and V.F.G.C.; project administration, R.M.A.V. and P.M.L.d.F.; funding acquisition, P.M.L.d.F. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

**Data Availability Statement:** Data available on request.

**Acknowledgments:** The development of this paper is framed within the CRITERIA project (atC eventdRiven capacITy modEls foR aIr nAvigation). This project is framed within a research, development (R&D), and innovation partnership between CRIDA and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The authors would like to thank CRIDA for their support in the development of this research line.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

### **References**


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