Many pilots have a personal ritual to fight the effects of fatigue on long flights.
Now they have help. Researchers for Sustained Operations at the Air Force Research Laboratory have taken the guesswork and voodoo out of it. It provides the military planner the first computerized tool that uses a homeostatic model to optimize aviator performance under conditions of limited sleep. It gives simultaneous comparisons of multiple schedules, reuseable schedules, and graphic and statistical output. It would be useful to planners and schedulers in highly complex and safety critical commercial environments such as transportation, nuclear power plants and industrial plants.