Abstract
Existing studies often overlook the additional impact of increased communication demands from Emergency Rescue Personnel (ERP) on apron controllers during aircraft-forced landings, leading to inaccurate workload assessments. This paper presents a quantitative approach to improve the evaluation of apron controllers’ workloads during emergency ground rescues by incorporating the states of ERP. Firstly, the approach systematically standardizes and calculates four features (apron controllers’ verbal communication signals, situation awareness, task complexity, and task performance) to quantify their workload. A correlation analysis follows this quantitation to identify key indicators representing the ERP’s states as replacements for the original communication-related features by determining their correlations with the apron controller's workload for improving the accuracy of workload evaluations. Additionally, subjective assessments from experienced apron controllers were collected to verify the effectiveness of the proposed quantitative workload approach by correlating them with the evaluated workload results. An experiment was conducted, in which 6 apron controllers and 10 ERPs were included to perform control and predetermined tasks, respectively, under four diverse emergency scenarios across three different periods, involving bidirectional communication (instructions given before and after each task). Using ERP’s fatigue states as one of the measures of the apron controller’s workload level would result in workload calculations with less error, confirming the superiority of using the new indicators screened by the proposed approach to quantify workload during apron emergency rescue control. This enhances the effectiveness of apron control operations in high-pressure situations, thereby securing more emergency response efforts.