Conceptual design of free flight with airborne separation assurance

Abstract

The study described in this paper originally aimed at studying the human factors problems of airborne separation in a Free Flight environment. However, to define the Free Flight environment with sufficient detail, an overall concept was also designed at NLR. This concept includes rules-of-the-sky, conflict detection, a conflict resolution algorithm, cockpit displays, system specification as well as an assessment of operational implications. The feasibility of the concept has been evaluated in three sub-studies: (i) off-line traffic simulations with very high traffic densities and a total of up to 300 aircraft in the incinity, (ii) a safety analysis comparing the resolution method with current day ATC and (iii) a man-in-the-loop simulator experiment with line pilots in traffic densities up to three times the average West-European traffic density in the particular airspace. None of these studies could refute the feasibility of the achieved Free Flight conceptual design.

Airborne separation assurance and traffic management - Research of concepts and technology

“…The National Aerospace Laboratory of The Netherlands (NLR) has developed and is investigating a system that may be appropriate for use in the separation assurance zone. 3 …”

“…1 One approach to achieving the long-term goal of mature-state free flight is to define a type of airspace that would allow aircraft to manage their operations autonomously. 2,3 This approach would require an aircraft to have autonomous separation assurance capability to gain access to "free flight airspace," which would most likely be defined as en route airspace above a specified flight level. This may not be appropriate for the continental United States airspace (CONUS), where it is imperative to minimize equipment required for airspace access and allow for a mix of avionics capability in individual aircraft.…”

Protocol-Based Conflict Resolution for Air Traffic Control

“…Several recent papers have focused on solving CD&R problems [4,13,20,24,31,26,33,25,27,14,21,16,10,6,29,2,34,3,7,23,18,11,39,1,12,9,15,8,36,37]. In a recent comprehensive survey, Kuchar and Yang [26] consider the problems of conflict detection and resolution separately; we focus on conflict resolution in this paper.…”

“…A third class of conflict resolution techniques uses force field methods and assumes aircraft fly in the force field generated by a potential function; the forces induced by the potential function form a resolution maneuver [23,18,11,39,9,40]. Duong and Zeghal [9] present a technique in which a force field "generated" by an intruding aircraft produces a conflict avoidance action and a force from the flight plan generates an attracting action.…”

Joint Metering and Conflict Resolution in Air Traffic Control

“…These methods can essentially be divided into rule-based approaches [8][9][10], force field methods [11], and optimization-based approaches [6,[12][13][14]. This paper belongs to the last category and adopts many of the simplifying assumptions made in previous research.…”