Remote Tower Air Traffic Controller Fatigue Detection Based on Eye-Tracking and EEG Fusion

Remote tower operations require air traffic controllers to maintain continuous visual monitoring and integrate information from panoramic displays, radar data, flight strips, and voice communication. Such screen-mediated and sustained surveillance tasks may lead to covert fatigue, which is difficult to capture using a single physiological or behavioral signal. To address this issue, this study proposes a Gated EEG–Eye Fusion Network (GEEF-Net) for window-level fatigue detection in remote tower controllers. EEG and eye-tracking signals were synchronously collected during simulated remote tower tasks and segmented into 5 s windows with a 2 s step. For each window, 53 EEG features and 47 eye-tracking features were extracted to construct a 100-dimensional multimodal representation. GEEF-Net adopts a lightweight modality-gating mechanism to adaptively weight EEG and eye-tracking representations before fatigue classification. Under the main subject-dependent validation setting, GEEF-Net achieved an Accuracy of 0.883, an F1-score of 0.788, and a ROC-AUC of 0.944, outperforming EEG-only, eye-only, and early-fusion baselines in most overall metrics. The gating analysis indicated that eye-tracking features received a higher average weight than EEG features, suggesting the importance of visual behavior in remote tower fatigue detection. Cross-subject validation showed that individual differences remain a major challenge, while few-shot subject-specific calibration improved model adaptation when limited target-subject samples were available. These findings suggest that EEG–eye-tracking fusion with lightweight modality gating is a feasible approach for fatigue detection in simulated remote tower tasks. However, larger datasets and operationally realistic validation considering shift work, circadian effects, and operational pressure are still required before the approach can be considered operationally reliable.