Solution Space Concept for Trajectory-Based Air Traffic Control: An Ecological Approach

THE increasing demand in worldwide air travel is foreseen to push the limits of capacity of the current Air TrafficManagement (ATM) system within the coming decade. Therefore, twomajor international programs have been initiated to fundamentally restructure the way in which Air Traffic Control (ATC) is performed. A key pillar in both programs is...

Conflict Resolution at High Traffic Densities with Reinforcement Learning

Increasing delays and congestion reported in many aviation sectors indicate that the current centralised operational model is rapidly approaching saturation levels. Air Traffic Control (ATC) system is not expected to keep pace with the ever-increasing demand for air transportation. Its capacity is still limited by the available controllers, and...

Policy Analysis of Safe Vertical Manoeuvring using Reinforcement Learning: Identifying when to Act and when to stay Idle

The number of unmanned aircraft operating in the airspace is expected to grow exponentially during the next decades. This will likely lead to traffic densities that are higher than those currently observed in civil and general aviation, and might require both a different airspace structure compared to conventional aviation, as well as different...

Arrival Management Support in the Presence of Prediction Uncertainty

Future concepts for Air Traffic Management (ATM) foresee—and even mandate—an increase in the distance from the destination airport at which the ATM system should start planning the arrival sequence and arrival time of inbound flights. By increasing the horizon beyond one hour before arrival, it becomes possible to timely adjust the flight path...

Lateral and Vertical Air Traffic Control Under Uncertainty Using Reinforcement Learning

Air traffic demand has increased at an unprecedented rate in the last decade (albeit interrupted by the COVID pandemic), but capacity has not increased at the same rate. Higher levels of automation and the implementation of decision-support tools for air traffic controllers could help increase capacity and catch up with demand. The air traffic...

20th International Symposium on Aviation Psychology (ISAP 2019)

The International Symposium on Aviation Psychology is convened for the purposes of: presenting the latest research on human performance problems and opportunities within aviation systems; envisioning design solutions that best utilize human capabilities for creating safe and efficient aviation systems; and bringing together scientists, research...

Analyzing and Modeling Capacity for Decentralized Air Traffic Control

The current system of Air Traffic Control (ATC) relies on a centralized control architecture. At its core, this system is heavily dependent on manual intervention by human Air Traffic Controllers (ATCos) to ensure safe operations. The capacity of this system is, therefore, closely tied to the maximum workload that can be tolerated by ATCos....

Evaluation of a 3D Solution Space-based ATC Workload Metric

Air Traffic Control (ATC) workload is a limiting factor for air traffic growth, creating a need for objective ATC workload metrics. Previous research has shown that the solution space diagram can be a basis for a workload prediction metric. The current solution space metric however, does not incorporate altitude. In this paper, a 3D solution...

Strategic Conformance: Exploring Acceptance of Individual-Sensitive Automation for Air Traffic Control

LIKE many complex and time-critical domains, air traffic control (ATC) is facing a fundamental modernization that builds on the use of more advanced automation (represented by SESAR in Europe and NextGen in the United States). The current function allocation-based relationship between controller and machine is envisioned to evolve to a more...

Coordination of scheduling decisions in the management of airport airspace and taxiway operations

This paper addresses the real-time problem of coordinating aircraft ground and air operations in an airport area. At a congested airport, airborne decisions are related to take-off and landing operations, while ground (taxiway) decisions consist of scheduling aircraft movements between the gates and the runways. Since the runways are the...

Ecological Interface Design: Sensor Failure Diagnosis in Air Traffic Control

Future air traffic control will have to rely on more advanced automation in order to support controllers in their job of safely controlling increased traffic volumes. A prerequisite for the success of such automation is that the underlying data driving it is reliable. Current technology, however, still warrants human supervision in coping with ...

Enabling Continuous Descent Operations in High-Density Traffic

The Air Traffic Management (ATM) community strives to reduce the environmental impact per flight. Continuous Descent Operation (CDO) has been identified by the ATM community as one of the operational improvements that could reduce aviation’s environmental impact, both in terms of aircraft noise and gaseous emissions. In the current ATM system,...

The estahlishment of safe separations between aircraft in flight

The paper starts with a review of the history of the use of models and statistical data for the assessment of separation standards. This work was mainly done by the ICAO Vertical Separation Panel, the North Atlantic Systems Planning Group and the ICAO Panel for the Review of the General Concept of Separation. After a brief description of the...