The Intelligent Cockpit Environment (ICE) Project

Introduction

The Intelligent Cockpit Environment (ICE) project deals with new techniques and technology for automation and decision support in the cockpit. The idea is that a Crew Assistance System (CAS) helps the crew with their tasks by offering relevant information, taking over tasks, or prioritizing alerts in case of malfunctions or mistakes. This way the situation awareness and performance of the crew will be increased.
To help the crew, the CAS should form its own ideas about what is going on, similar to the crew's situation awareness. Also, it should be capable of reasoning and making decisions what to do. Below we show a global model of a CAS.

Picture of CAS model

Global model of a Crew Assistance System

Project goal

The goal of the ICE project is to design, test, and evaluate computational techniques that can be used in the development of intelligent situation-aware crew assistance systems. Using methods from artificial intelligence, ICE focuses primarily on the data fusion, data processing and reasoning part of these systems. Special issues addressed in the ICE project are:

Situation recognition
Mission or flightplan monitoring
Attack management
Pilot workload monitoring