A Flatness Based Speed Control Approach For Merge Behind Operations

Abstract

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.A flatness based speed control approach for merge behind operations Thierry MiquelTo cite this version: Over the last few years, several concepts dealing the delegation to the flight crew of some tasks currently performed by the air traffic controllers have emerged. Among these new ideas, relative guidance has appeared to be capable to contribute to the enhancement of air traffic capacity though it raises difficult technical challenges. Indeed, this kind of maneuver appears difficult to perform manually, and may induce an excessive increase in flight crew workload, thus requiring new on-board automated functions. Some linear and nonlinear techniques have already been studied to design a feedback loop which performs automatically merging maneuvers and maintains station keeping behind a designated aircraft. The main contribution of this paper consists in the design of a feedback control loop using flatness control: this technique takes advantage of feedback linearization through a reference error between the ghost position of the leading aircraft and the current position of the trailing aircraft to provide a commanded speed to the autothrottle speed control system of the trailing aircraft. The robustness of the proposed design with respect to uncertainties in the dynamics of the leading aircraft and in the dynamics of the autothrottle speed control system of the trailing aircraft is achieved by the periodic update of the reference error. The reference error generation is detailed and simulation results are presented.

Reference Airspeed Setting for Time Constrained Descent at Idle Thrust

“…Following previous work [13] , we will consider the following expression for reference length l(τ), where parameters a0, a1, a2 and b are free parameters:…”