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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, DIA-08-1101-001, is dated 15 December 2010. The Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office produced it under the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Applications program. It asks how many unmanned spacecraft one pilot could control in a future deep-space fleet, drawing on air traffic control and multiple unmanned vehicle research. It concludes the limits are about 16 craft for simple tasks, 7 for moderately complex ones and 4 for complex heterogeneous craft. It adds that physiological measures can signal operator overload.
From the source: Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 12/15/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD examines how many unmanned spacecraft a single human operator could realistically supervise or control at once, using research from air traffic control and multi-vehicle remote piloting as rough analogs. The report argues that the practical limit depends heavily on task complexity: about 16 craft for simple monitoring or destination assignment, about 7 for moderately complex piloting or mission tasks, and about 4 for complex heterogeneous operations. It places particular emphasis on the operator’s ability to maintain a coherent mental “big picture” of multiple vehicles at once, and it suggests that automation and external displays can help by offloading working-memory demands, though not eliminating them. The document also highlights physiological workload measures as a possible way to detect or predict operator overload in real time. Overall, it presents multi-spacecraft control as a human-factors and systems-integration problem in which progress depends on managing cognitive limits through interface design, automation, and workload monitoring.
UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOA QFFI&ilsT.tk WSE 8HLV Lamoureaux researched in 1999 whether a proposed ATC augmentation system could safely allow smaller distances between aircraft and thus increase traffic capacity without building new airports or runways. Pairs of aircraft were characterized based on their direction of travel and separation as shown in Table 1. During the task, operators rated their instantaneous perceived workload on a five -point scale roughly correspond ing to D, Al, A2, A3/B, and B/C.i Operators were prompted for their self assessment once every two minutes. The experiment was able to generate self assessment values between 1 and 4; no overload conditions were generated in this study. Using a model based on task variance and complexity of current aircraft under control, the researchers were able to predict perceived workload 74% of the time, but more importantly, were able to predict a self-rating of 4 for 80% of the cases. Predicting the boredom value of 1 was less successful, at about 60% . Besides the numerical predictions, the authors conclude that complexity of the task drives perceived workload . 26 Table 1. Variables used in Determining Complexity of the Traffic relationship between pairs of aircraft. Using four variables with three thresholds gives different classes of complexity . For example, an aircraft pa ir could be 5 miles apart (3 to 7 threshold), traveling in the same lateral direction, flying with 2500 ft of vertical separation (> 2000ft), and both straight and level. There are 81 such combinations . Variable Threshold Low Mid High Lateral separation 7 miles Lateral direction Same direction Opposite direction Crossing Vertical separation 2000 ft Vertical direction Both straight and level One straight, one climbing or descending Both climbing or descending Physiological indicators of stress were measured at two low-traffic control centers (Fayetteville, AR and Roswell, NM) and one higher traffic center (Oklahoma City). Heart rates were measures along with hormone secretion levels in urine. The urine specimens were pooled before analysis into two groups throughout a 5-day workweek: during the 8-hour workday, night time after work. Additionally, controllers completed the State Trait Anxiety Index before and after each workday. Results showed that lower traffic centers exhibited lower stress levels, and that the best biological indicator of stress was epinephrine levels from urine rather than HR. The authors concluded that traffic load and complexity were the main sources of stress in the ATC task rather than the nature of the job itself. 27 A straightforward experiment to look at physiological responses using EEG and EOG to lapses in attention during ATC tasks was performed by Peiris in 2005. The goal of the study was to categorize expert analysis of EEG/EOG data to develop an automated analysis program that could read the data online without human intervention to alert operators to attention lapses and low levels of alertness. Professional ATC operators were given 10 minute intervals of the psychomotor vigilance task (PVT). Recorded data was evaluated by several human expert EEG and EOG analyzers. These experts were not able to correctly identify alertness or attention lapses (EEG identified only 6 of 101 J In this study, t he A3/B rating described "Non -essential tasks suffering, could not work at this level for long, " while 8/C described getting behind and losing situational awareness. UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOR OFFICIAL tJ!H! 8Hklf 11
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 31 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.