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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently made significant advancements and is now pervasive across various application domains. This holds true for Air Transportation as well, where AI is increasingly involved in decision-making processes. While these algorithms are designed to assist users in their daily tasks, they still face challenges related to acceptance and trustworthiness. Users often harbor doubts about the decisions proposed by AI, and in some cases, they may even oppose them. This is primarily because AI-generated decisions are often opaque, non-intuitive, and incompatible with human reasoning. Moreover, when AI is deployed in safety-critical contexts like Air Traffic Management (ATM), the individual decisions generated by AI models must be highly reliable for human operators. Understanding the behavior of the model and providing explanations for its results are essential requirements in every life-critical domain. In this scope, this project aimed to enhance transparency and explainability in AI algorithms within the Air Traffic Management domain. This article presents the results of the project’s validation conducted for a Conflict Detection and Resolution task involving 21 air traffic controllers (10 experts and 11 students) in En-Route position (i.e. hight altitude flight management). Through a controlled study incorporating three levels of explanation, we offer initial insights into the impact of providing additional explanations alongside a conflict resolution algorithm to improve decision-making. At a high level, our findings indicate that providing explanations is not always necessary, and our project sheds light on potential research directions for education and training purposes.

Recently, Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have received increasable interest in various application domains including in Air Transportation Management (ATM). Different AI in particular Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are used to provide decision support in autonomous decision-making tasks in the ATM domain e.g., predicting air transportation traffic and optimizing traffic flows. However, most of the time these automated systems are not accepted or trusted by the intended users as the decisions provided by AI are often opaque, non-intuitive and not understandable by human operators. Safety is the major pillar to air traffic management, and no black box process can be inserted in a decision-making process when human life is involved. To address this challenge related to transparency of the automated system in the ATM domain, we investigated AI methods in predicting air transportation traffic conflict and optimizing traffic flows based on the domain of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Here, AI models’ explainability in terms of understanding a decision i.e., post hoc interpretability and understanding how the model works i.e., transparency can be provided for air traffic controllers. In this paper, we report our research directions and our findings to support better decision making with AI algorithms with extended transparency.

Air Traffic Management (ATM) will be more complex in the coming decades due to the growth and increased complexity of aviation and has to be improved in order to maintain aviation safety. It is agreed that without significant improvement in this domain, the safety objectives defined by international organisations cannot be achieved and a risk of more incidents/accidents is envisaged. Nowadays, computer science plays a major role in data management and decisions made in ATM. Nonetheless, despite this, Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is one of the most researched topics in computer science, has not quite reached end users in ATM domain. In this paper, we analyse the state of the art with regards to usefulness of AI within aviation/ATM domain. It includes research work of the last decade of AI in ATM, the extraction of relevant trends and features, and the extraction of representative dimensions. We analysed how the general and ATM eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) works, analysing where and why XAI is needed, how it is currently provided, and the limitations, then synthesise the findings into a conceptual framework, named the DPP (Descriptive, Predictive, Prescriptive) model, and provide an example of its application in a scenario in 2030. It concludes that AI systems within ATM need further research for their acceptance by end-users. The development of appropriate XAI methods including the validation by appropriate authorities and end-users are key issues that needs to be addressed. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Understanding the neural mechanisms responsible for human social interactions is difficult, since the brain activities of two or more individuals have to be examined simultaneously and correlated with the observed social patterns. We introduce the concept of hyper-brain network, a connectivity pattern representing at once the information flow among the cortical regions of a single brain as well as the relations among the areas of two distinct brains. Graph analysis of hyper-brain networks constructed from the EEG scanning of 26 couples of individuals playing the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma reveals the possibility to predict non-cooperative interactions during the decision-making phase. The hyper-brain networks of two-defector couples have significantly less inter-brain links and overall higher modularity - i.e. the tendency to form two separate subgraphs - than couples playing cooperative or tit-for-tat strategies. The decision to defect can be "read" in advance by evaluating the changes of connectivity pattern in the hyper-brain network.