Flight simulator testing of cockpit traffic displays using robust situation generation

Flight simulator experiments testing cockpit traffic displays are underway, for applications such as Free Flight and closely-spaced parallel approaches. To meet their repeatability requirements, the recently developed Robust Situation Generation (RSG) architecture is being used. RSG uses feedback of the subject aircraft slates, such that the pseudo-agents will act to consistently generate the required situations, regardless of variations in the subjects' actions. However, the use of RSG mandates changes in the experiment design to include the development and testing of the RSG scripts of situations. The RSG system follows pre-set scripts involving several variables; some iteration of the script design may be required to match experiment specifications. To generate any one desired situation, the experiment designer can use one of several possible RSG command sequences. Each of these command sequences have different characteristics and will be discussed. The robustness and fidelity of the command sequences depends strongly on the detail and time-scales of the pre-determined script, and reasonable time-scales for different situations will be given. Finally, RSG allows for greater control over the situations that will occur, allowing for more careful evaluation of the desired nature of the situations. These variations will be discussed.