Ergonomic Evaluation Index System for Fighter Planes Cockpit Touch Screens
Authors: Wang Fei , Tang Wenzhe , Hu Ruoyu , Zhu Zhiman , Xu Xiuhang , Xue Chengqi 
Published: April 2022

Touch screens have gradually replaced interactive devices such as buttons and keyboards in the cockpit with natural and intuitive characteristics. Touch interaction also may lead to more head-down time and unintended touch. However, on the battlefield, the lives of pilots are affected by the efficiency of touch interaction. The purpose of this study is to establish and verify metrics to evaluate the usability of the cockpit touch screen. These metrics cover the pilots ' cognitive decision-making, operational performance, physiological performance, control and display resources of the fighter touch screen, etc. In this study, the ergonomic evaluation index of cockpit touch screen was established and verified by specific methods, which mainly constructed from the pilots, fighters, flight environment and other perspectives. Based on the traditional ergonomics evaluation theory and its application, and combined with the national standards and industry standards of aircraft touch screen, this study describes the new ergonomics evaluation metrics suitable for aircraft cockpit touch screen. According to the methods of construction and classification of metrics system of multiple research objects and fields, three levels evaluation metrics model was proposed by our research groups. The first-level metrics of the framework mainly include the cognitive layer, the interaction layer and the impression layer. With regards to the perception layer, it mainly focuses on the process of the pilot receiving information to complete the action, which includes perception/ cognition, memorization/ learning and action/response. Furthermore, the interaction layer mainly includes display attributes, control attributes and display-control comprehensive attributes, while the impression layer focuses on the subjective experience of the pilot after the operation. In addition, the evaluation index model of this study includes 3 first-level metrics, 6 second-level metrics, and 48 third-level metrics. In this study, 12 experts who specialized in the area of aviation efficiency evaluation were investigated to verify the effectiveness and reliability of the metrics framework from the aspects of the necessity, feasibility, identification of a single metric, and the integrity and redundancy overlap of the overall metrics system. The experimental results show that for every single index, they own high identification and feasibility, and no serious overlap between each index can be found. In terms of necessity, we combined with necessity coefficient data and expert interview after the experiment, and six third-level metrics with the coefficient of necessity lower than the general level were excluded. With respect to the metric framework, high integrity, low structural redundancy of the evaluation index system, and high independence between the evaluation structures can be found. Moreover, the overall evaluation index model has high reliability and validity. Overall, we study and establish an evaluation index system of the cockpit touch screen. It helps to find the problem of design parameters during the cockpit touch screen design，and improve the operational performance and survival probability of pilots.