Modeling a responsibility-transfer service for the delegation of tasks in airborne separation procedures and ground automation

Ongoing research in air traffic management aims at higher integration between the air and the ground and proposes a number of concepts that increasingly delegate tasks from the air traffic controller on the ground to the pilots in the cockpit. Such concepts require a perfect synchronisation of the state of delegation between ground and flight deck, as well as between humans and automation. Therefore it is useful to consider a datalink service that transacts the tasks in a simple, clear and unanimous way - the Responsibility-Transfer Service. The conception of this service is approached with the analysis and modeling of the air traffic control process in a service-oriented manner using roles. By splitting up the controllers' roles and modeling these tasks it is further argued that the tasks can be transparently transferred to other locations or parties, may that be to the flight deck as proposed for airborne separation procedures or to ground based automatic decision support tools. The output of this study is that precise modeling using a visual modeling language is a useful tool in realising new concepts and providing better domain understanding.