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...

Investigating Transparency Needs for Supervising Unmanned Air Traffic Management Systems

To facilitate a smooth integration of drones into the current Air Traffic Management (ATM) system, Unmanned Air Traffic Management (UTM) systems, services and protocols are currently under development. Unlike current ATM, UTM will rely on high levels of automation. This is potentially problematic, because 100% safe and reliable automation under...

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...

Towards Human-Automation Teamwork in Shared En-Route Air Traffic Control: Task Analysis

In the quest for more efficient air traffic management, a common approach is to allocate an increasing amount of functionality to higher levels of automation, with a supervisory role for humans. This potentially leads to forthcoming issues such as skill degradation and out-of-the-loop phenomenon. If the traffic in an airspace is instead shared...

Fuel Inefficiency Characterisation and Assessment due to Early Execution of Top of Descents: A Case Study for Amsterdam-Schiphol Terminal Airspace using ADS-B data

The vertical trajectory plan (altitude and speed) corresponding to the descent phase of a modern airliner is computed by the on-board flight management system while the aircraft is still in cruise. As long as the constraints on the arrival procedure allow, this system plans for an idle descent and the exact location of the (optimal) top of...

Flight Allocation in Shared Human-Automation En-Route Air Traffic Control

Allocation is a challenge for higher levels of automation in air traffic control, where flights can be dynamically assigned to either a human or an automated agent. Through an exploratory experiment with six professional air traffic controllers, insight was gained into the possibilities and challenges of human-automation teamwork in an en-route...

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...

The Influence of Traffic Structure on Airspace Capacity

Airspace structure can be used as a procedural mechanism for a priori separation and organization of en-route air traffic. Although many studies have explored novel structuring methods to increase en-route airspace capacity, the relationship between the level of structuring of traffic and airspace capacity is not well established. To better...

Metropolis: Relating airspace structure and capacity for extreme traffic densities

Personal and unmanned aerial vehicles have received increasing media attention over the last decade. As a result of the growing excitement for these two aircraft types, many within and outside the aerospace industry envision a future in which large numbers of small aircraft fly over urban areas. With this vision for the future, the question...

Functional modelling of airspace

Human machine aspects of arrivals management in future air navigation environments