Advanced Helicopter Cockpit Information Management

The growing complexity of advanced helicopter systems has increased pilot workload. Human-machine interface characteristics and thus mission performance are adversely affected by less than optimal integration of information from complex helicopter systems. Expert system technology offers great potential for alleviating the pilot workload associated with making routine as well as exceptional decisions as to information to be displayed. The numerous possible combinatioins of display information can be intelligently filtered by an expert system dedicated to cockpit information management. An additional benefit is the flexibility obtained through an expert system implementation of a cockpit information manager. This paper describes a prototype expert system developed to demonstrate these benefits.