VAST - Virtual Airspace and Tower

Air traffic control is a complex, safety-critical work area. The market has few innovations. Flight operators have been working with the same technology for decades. It abstracts the air space and visualizes it two-dimensionally (RADAR and its graphical user interfaces). Air traffic controllers are forced to obtain and keep the situation overview by means of the mental extraction of the third dimension. Flight levels, for eample, are shown as text labels. Another complicating factor is that the interpolation of the aircraft position data is only updated every 1-4 seconds. This task represents a very high cognitive burden on the controllers.

VAST, Virtual Airspace and Tower, examines the use of state-of-the-art visual computing technologies and concepts to map traffic in the virtual space so that the situation overview is better and easier to obtain. VAST also checks whether efficiency (faster decision-making) and security (conflict detection) are positively influenced by VAST.