Contextual Coordination

CONTEXTUAL KNOWLEDGE
COORDINATION IN AIR TRAFFIC
CONTROL OPERATIONS

Ronish Joyekurun†‡, William Wong† & Paola Amaldi†
Ronish.Joyekurun.ext@eurocontrol.int; {P.Amaldi-Trillo, W.Wong}@mdx.ac.uk
†Interaction Design Centre, Middlesex University, London NW4 4BT, UK.
‡EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre, F-91222 Bretigny Sur Orge, France.

Ronish Joyekurun†‡, William Wong† & Paola Amaldi† 7th EUROCONTROL
Innovative Research Workshop & Exhibition
December 2nd-4th 2008

INTRODUCTION: Coordination

1. ATC Work is NOT individualistic or isolated over extended periods of time.

Theoretical need for
2. Operational need for better
coordination principles in
coordination in ATM
complex work domains
e.g.
e.g.
• Inter-sector (FASTI, SYSCO)
• Collaborative Decision Making
• Inter-controller (AMAN-DMAN)
• Cognition in Distributed Teams
• Inter-centre (ACC, TMA)
• Shared Awareness
• Inter-organisational (Civil-Military)
• Design for Coordinative Systems

“..a formalism widely used in computer science to represent process flows in distributed or
3. parallel systems. This language is part of a larger theoretical framework called
quot;coordination mechanics.” Holt (1988)
“..the act of managing interdependencies between activities performed to achieve a goal.”
Malone (1994)
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SCOPE OF RESEARCH

How does [experience] help controllers address
coordinative performance demands in ATC?
• Resilience Engineering (Hollnagel, 2006) to provide systemic concepts
• CSCW (Carlile, 2002) to provide coordinative work analysis framework

ATM-MET Interaction, Conceptual View (Joyekurun, Wong, & Amaldi, 2008)

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METHODOLOGY

• 2 Short Field Study using Ethnography
• CRNA/Nord (Athis Mons) & Orly TMA
• 11 working days; 2 controller working shifts
• A-priori framework: Resilience Engineering (ATM-MET Concept)
CRNA/Nord
• Data Collection Methods
• Direct, Overt observations
• Shadow-mode and semi-structured interviews
• Document Analysis

• Qualitative Data Analysis
• Grounded Theory
• Axial coding
• Selective coding

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RESULTS

• Total of 50 unique cases of systemic disturbances at CRNA/N & Orly
• Total of 34 unique cases of MET disturbances
• “Experience” is the adaptive factor in 65 references across all cases.
70
• What is experience? 60
• Enables coordinative work 50
40
• Facilitates coordinative work 30

• When is it useful? When facing: 20
10
• Low frequency events 0

• Non-proceduralised cases Procedure Deviation Experience

Table 1: Total references across cases of adaptation
• Small time horizon
• How is it used?
• By combining specialist knowledge across knowledge boundaries
• By using a pragmatic mode of coordination

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RESULTS: Examples

• Enabling Coordinative Work

• Facilitating Coordinative Work

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RESULTS: Examples

• Low frequency events

• Non-proceduralised events

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RESULTS: Examples

• Boundary spanning knowledge coordination

• Pragmatic mode

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CONCLUSION

RQ: How does experience help controllers address
coordinative performance demands in ATC?

By adapting to constraints:-

• Procedures (e.g. Phraseology)
• Low frequency, un-trained events
• Time horizon to goals
• Specialist knowledge boundaries

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FUTURE WORK

Design Framework for building coordinative artifacts in ATC

• Design Hypothesis - coordinative artifacts needs to:
• a) embed at least the syntactic level knowledge while
allowing,
• b) a modification of semantic level knowledge and,
• c) an augmentation using pragmatic level knowledge
for matching the artifact to the context of use.

• Validation Experiment

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REFERENCES

- Carlile, P. (2002). A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries: Boundary Objects in New Product Development.
Organization Science, 13(4), 442-455
- Hollnagel, E., Woods, D., & Leveson, N. (Eds.). (2006). Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts. England: Ashgate.
- Joyekurun, R., Wong, W., & Amaldi, P. (2008). Responding to Uncertainty on Approach in Hazardous Situations. Paper presented
at the ICRAT 2008: International Conference on Research in Air Transportation, 2008.,
- FASTI. (2007). First ATC Support Tools Implementation (FASTI) - Operational Concept: EUROCONTROL.
- Malone, T., & Crowston, K. (1990). What is Coordination Theory and how can it help Design Cooperative
Work Systems. Paper presented at the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Los Angeles.
- Holt, A. W. Diplans: A new language for the study and implementation of coordination. ACM Transactions on Office Information
Systems, 6(2), 109-125, 1988.

Acknowledgement
The controllers, supervisors and management at Athis Mons (CRNA/Nord) as well as Orly Tower have
•
my deepest gratitude for sharing their work with me over the period of the studies.
I also thank the EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre and the French DGAC for working out the
•
administrative procedures for access to the control centres.
This work is supported by the EUROCONTROL Agency under financial line A-B01-C7-120000-61615-
•
INS-0-20-MIPH (Progress monitoring by Mr. Alistair Jackson and Finance tracking by Mr. Marc
Bourgois).
Finally, special thanks to Mr. Franck Ben Abdallah aka. Francky at the CRNA/Nord for facilitating the
•
integration at the centre, and also to doctoral researcher Ella Pinska for introducing me to Francky.

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Contextual Coordination

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