Design and evaluation of NextGen aircraft separation assurance concepts

Abstract

To support the development and evaluation of future function allocation concepts for separation assurance systems for the Next Generation Air Transportation System, this paper presents the design and human-in-the-loop evaluation of three feasible function allocation concepts that allocate primary aircraft separation assurance responsibilities and workload to: 1) pilots; 2) air traffic controllers (ATC); and 3) automation. The design of these concepts also included rules of the road, separation assurance burdens for aircraft of different equipage levels, and utilization of advanced weather displays paired with advanced conflict detection and resolution automation. Results of the human-in-theloop simulation show that: a) all the concepts are robust with respect to weather perturbation; b) concept 1 (pilots) had highest throughput, closest to assigned spacing, and fewest violations of speed and altitude restrictions; c) the energy of the aircraft during the descent phase was better managed in concepts 1 and 2 (pilots and ATC) than in concept 3 (automation), in which the situation awareness of pilots and controllers was lowest, and workload of pilots was highest. The paper also discusses further development of these concepts and their augmentation and integration with future air traffic management tools and systems that are being considered for NextGen.

Air traffic generation for new terminal area air traffic management concepts design and evaluation

“…Historically, it has been widely used to design new operational concepts, including humans-in-the-loop simulations for validation (i.e. paired approaches, 1 flight-deck-based merging 2 and separation assurance 3 ). Additionally, it has been used for the evaluation of system-wide performance 4 and for optimisation, using higher level modelling (as in oceanic airspace in the Pacific, 5 in the National Airspace Systems, using multi-agent simulation 6,7 ) or focusing at the node (airport or terminal area) -as in the Dulles Airport arrival operations redesig n, 8 in which Terminal Area Route Generation Evaluation and Traffic Simulation (TARGETS) software and Base of Aircraft Data (BADA) have been used.…”