Adaptive aerial ecosystem framework to support tactical conflict resolution

Abstract

To support a seamless transition between safety net layers in air traffic management, this article examines an extra capacity in the generation of the resolution trajectories, conditioned by future high dense, complex surrounding air traffic scenarios. The aerial ecosystem framework consists of a set of aircraft services inside a digitalised airspace volume, in which amended trajectories could induce a set of safety events such as an induced collision. Those aircraft services strive to the formation of a cost-efficient airborne separation management by exploring the preferred resolutions and actively interacting with each other. This study focuses on the dynamic analysis of a decreasing rate in the number of available resolutions, as well as the ecosystem deadlock event from the identified spatiotemporal interdependencies among the ecosystem aircraft at the separation management level. A deadlock event is characterised by a time instant at which an induced collision could emerge as an effect of an ecosystem aircraft trajectory amendment. Through simulations of two generated ecosystems, extracted from a real traffic scenario, the paper illustrates the relevant properties inside the structure of the ecosystem interdependencies, demonstrates and discusses an available time capacity for the resolution process of the aerial ecosystem.

Spatiotemporal Graph Indicators for Air Traffic Complexity Analysis

“…Another area where complexity metrics can impact ATCo workload and as a consequence ATM capacity, are conflict detection and resolution (CD & R) [14][15][16][17] decision support tools. A desirable characteristic of such solvers will be the quality of solutions in terms of complexity, which means that a conflict resolution that leaves the sector in a more complex state should be discouraged in favour of solutions that ideally lead to lower complexity, while preserving safety.…”