A Human Performance Model of Commercial Jetliner Taxiing

There is a critical gap in attempting to predict aviation system performance between large-scale engineering-oriented simulations and human-in-the-loop experiments. In order to bridge this gap, we have constructed a model of a human pilot taxiing a commercial jetliner using ACT-R, a computational theory of human cognition and performance. The model was constructed on the basis of a task analysis that was synthesized from a mixture of prior literature, official procedures, and consultations with SMEs. The model taxis a simulated 737 in the X-Plane flight simulation environment. Our approach to validation, which we believe to be unique, will be to validate the model against actual taxi trajectories recorded by real pilots at DFW airport in actual operations. The model can ultimately be used to provide higher-fidelity pilots in large simulations or used to populate the environment in human-in-the-loop experiments.