Analysis of Automated Aircraft Conflict Resolution and Weather Avoidance

This paper describes simulations of an automated planning system that routes flights around airspace impacted by forecasted convective weather. If the system predicts that a flight will enter a weather-impacted airspace within a predefined time horizon, it generates a new route. Because the forecasts are uncertain, the system periodically generates, using updates of the weather forecasts and radar tracks, new reroutes. The simulations included convective weather in the northeastern quadrant of the United States over a 24-hr period. Multiple simulations investigated the system performance as the planning horizon and planning frequency varied. As the planning horizon and frequency increased, the system successfully routed more traffic around weather but with more route changes. For a planning horizon of 20 to 120 minutes and a planning frequency of four cycles per hour, the reroutes increased flight time by 3.3% and avoided 79% of the weather-impacted airspaces that were detected. Most flights required one to three reroutes to pass by a weather-impacted airspace, while the worst case flights required six reroutes.

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“…The maneuver avoided the airspace by deviating the flight around the shorter side of the airspace. In [7], Love et. al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Convective weather avoidance with uncertain weather forecasts

Windhorst

Refai

Karahan

2009

2009 IEEE/AIAA 28th Digital Avionics Systems Conference

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“…6 While its aircraft separation component has undergone careful analysis 8,9,10,11,12 and human-in-the-loop simulations, 13,14,15,16,17,18 less has been done to assess the Advanced Airspace Concept's performance in the presence of dynamic and uncertain weather. Love 19 modeled weather conflicts as aircraft-toaircraft head-on conflicts to provide an integrated weather avoidance capability and investigated the efficiency of this weather avoidance (for Indianapolis center) but in that study some secondary conflicts § are not resolved and count as failures of the resolution algorithm thus the impact on conflict resolution performance is not fully assessed. Note also that the method used in Ref.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Note also that the method used in Ref. 19 can potentially lead to suboptimal avoidance maneuvers (and higher rates of failure) because it uses resolution algorithms designed for aircraft separation standards not large weather cells. In Ref.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of Tactical and Strategic Weather Avoidance on Separation Assurance

Refai

Windhorst

2011

11th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations (ATIO) Conference

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The ability to keep flights away from weather hazards while maintaining aircraft-toaircraft separation is critically important. The Advanced Airspace Concept is an automation concept that implements a ground-based strategic conflict resolution algorithm for management of aircraft separation. The impact of dynamic and uncertain weather avoidance on this concept is investigated. A strategic weather rerouting system is integrated with the Advanced Airspace Concept, which also provides a tactical weather avoidance algorithm, in a fast time simulation of the Air Transportation System. Strategic weather rerouting is used to plan routes around weather in the 20 minute to two-hour time horizon. To address forecast uncertainty, flight routes are revised at 15 minute intervals. Tactical weather avoidance is used for short term trajectory adjustments (30 minute planning horizon) that are updated every minute to address any weather conflicts (instances where aircraft are predicted to pass through weather cells) that are left unresolved by strategic weather rerouting. The fast time simulation is used to assess the impact of tactical weather avoidance on the performance of automated conflict resolution as well as the impact of strategic weather rerouting on both conflict resolution and tactical weather avoidance. The results demonstrate that both tactical weather avoidance and strategic weather rerouting increase the algorithm complexity required to find aircraft conflict resolutions. Results also demonstrate that tactical weather avoidance is prone to higher airborne delay than strategic weather rerouting. Adding strategic weather rerouting to tactical weather avoidance reduces total airborne delays for the reported scenario by 18% and reduces the number of remaining weather violations by 13%. Finally, two features are identified that have proven important for strategic weather rerouting to realize these benefits; namely, the ability to revise reroutes and the use of maneuvers that start far ahead of encountering a weather cell when rerouting around weather. Nomenclature AAC= Advanced Airspace Concept CDR = Aircraft-to-aircraft conflict detection and resolution CR = Aircraft-to-aircraft conflict resolution NAS = National Airspace System RUC = The Rapid Update Cycle, a numerical weather forecast TWx = Tactical weather avoidance SWx = Strategic weather avoidance

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“…Several rerouting algorithms [1][2][3][4][5][6] that utilize weather forecast have been developed in recent years. The studies in Refs.1-2 reduce the optimal routing problem to a shortest path search.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automated Flight Routing Using Stochastic Dynamic Programming

Morando

Grabbe

2010

10th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations (ATIO) Conference

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Airspace capacity reduction due to convective weather impedes air traffic flows and causes traffic congestion. This study presents an algorithm that reroutes flights in the presence of winds, enroute convective weather, and congested airspace based on stochastic dynamic programming. A stochastic disturbance model incorporates into the reroute design process the capacity uncertainty. A trajectory-based airspace demand model is employed for calculating current and future airspace demand. The optimal routes minimize the total expected traveling time, weather incursion, and induced congestion costs. They are compared to weather-avoidance routes calculated using deterministic dynamic programming. The stochastic reroutes have smaller deviation probability than the deterministic counterpart when both reroutes have similar total flight distance. The stochastic rerouting algorithm takes into account all convective weather fields with all severity levels while the deterministic algorithm only accounts for convective weather systems exceeding a specified level of severity. When the stochastic reroutes are compared to the actual flight routes, they have similar total flight time, and both have about 1% of travel time crossing congested enroute sectors on average. The actual flight routes induce slightly less traffic congestion than the stochastic reroutes but intercept more severe convective weather.

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Analysis of Automated Aircraft Conflict Resolution and Weather Avoidance

Cited by 11 publications

References 3 publications

Convective weather avoidance with uncertain weather forecasts

Convective weather avoidance with uncertain weather forecasts

Impact of Tactical and Strategic Weather Avoidance on Separation Assurance

Automated Flight Routing Using Stochastic Dynamic Programming

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