Symbolic representation of scenarios in Bologna airport on virtual reality concept

This paper is a part of a big Project named Retina Project, which is focused in reduce the workload of an ATCO. It uses the last technological advances as Virtual Reality concept. The work has consisted in studying the different awareness situations that happens daily in Bologna Airport. It has been analysed one scenario with good visibility where the sun predominates and two other scenarios with poor visibility where the rain and the fog dominate. Due to the study of visibility in the three scenarios computed, the conclusion obtained is that the overlay must be shown with a constant dimension regardless the position of the aircraft to be readable by the ATC and also, the frame and the flight strip should be coloured in a showy colour (like red) for a better control by the ATCO

High performance computing simulator for the performance assessment of trajectory based operations

High performance computing (HPC), both at hardware and software level, has demonstrated significant improve- ments in processing large datasets in a timely manner. However, HPC in the field of air traffic management (ATM) can be much more than only a time reducing tool. It could also be used to build an ATM simulator in which distributed scenarios where decentralized elements (airspace users) interact through a centralized manager in order to generate a trajectory-optimized conflict-free scenario. In this work, we introduce an early prototype of an ATM simulator, focusing on air traffic flow management at strategic, pre-tactical and tactical levels, which allows the calculation of safety and efficiency indicators for optimized trajectories, both at individual and network level. The software architecture of the simulator, relying on a HPC cluster of computers, has been preliminary tested with a set of flights whose trajectory vertical profiles have been optimized according to two different concepts of operations: conventional cruise operations (i.e. flying at constant altitudes and according to the flight levels scheme rules) and continuous climb cruise operations (i.e., optimizing the trajectories with no vertical constraints). The novel ATM simulator has been tested to show preliminary benchmarking results between these two concepts of operations. The simulator here presented can contribute as a testbed to evaluate the potential benefits of future Trajectory Based Operations and to understand the complex relationships among the different ATM key performance areasPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

An Analysis of the Spatio-Temporal Factors Affecting Aircraft Conflicts Based on Simulation Modelling

The demand for air travel worldwide continues to grow at a rapid rate, especially in Europe and the United States. In Europe, the demand exceeded predictions with a real annual growth of 7.1% in the period 1985-1990, against a prediction of 2.4%. By the year 2010, the demand is expected to double from the 1990 level. Within the UK international scheduled passenger traffic is predicted to increase, on average, by 5.8 per cent per year between 1999 and 2003. The demand has not been matched by availability of capacity. In Western Europe many of the largest airports suffer from runway capacity constraints. Europe also suffers from an en-route airspace capacity constraint, which is determined by the workload of the air traffic controllers, i.e. the physical and mental work that controllers must undertake to safely conduct air traffic under their jurisdiction through en-route airspace. The annual cost to Europe due to air traffic inefficiency and congestion in en-route airspace is estimated to be 5 billion US Dollars, primarily due to delays caused by non-optimal route structures and reduced productivity of controllers due to equipment inefficiencies. Therefore, to in order to decrease the total delay, an increase in en-route capacity is of paramount importance. At a global scale and in the early 1980s, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) recognised that the traditional air traffic control (ATC) systems would not cope with the growth in demand for capacity. Consequently new technologies and procedures have been proposed to enable ATC to cope with this demand, e.g. satellite-based system concept to meet the future civil aviation requirements for communication, navigation and surveillance/ air traffic management (CNS/ATM). In Europe, the organisation EUROCONTROL (established in 1960 to co-ordinate European ATM) proposed a variety of measures to increase the capacity of en-route airspace. A key change envisaged is the increasing delegation of responsibilities for control to flight crew, by the use of airborne separation assurance between aircraft, leading eventually to ?free flight? airspace. However, there are major concerns regarding the safety of operations in ?free flight? airspace. The safety of such airspace can be investigated by analysing the factors that affect conflict occurrence, i.e. a loss of the prescribed separation between two aircraft in airspace. This paper analyses the factors affecting conflict occurrence in current airspace and future free flight airspace by using a simulation model of air traffic controller workload, the RAMS model. The paper begins with a literature review of the factors that affect conflict occurrence. This is followed by a description of the RAMS model and of its use in this analysis. The airspace simulated is the Mediterranean Free Flight region, and the major attributes of this region and of the traffic demand patterns are outlined next. In particular a day?s air traffic is simulated in the two airspace scenarios, and rules for conflict detection and resolution are carefully defined. The following section outlines the framework for analysing the output from the simulations, using negative binomial (NB) and generalised negative binomial (GNB) regression, and discusses the estimation methods required. The next section presents the results of the regression analysis, taking into account the spatio-temporal nature of the data. The following section presents an analysis of the spatial and temporal pattern of conflicts in the two airspace scenarios across a day, highlighting possible metrics to indicate this. The paper concludes with future research directions based upon this analysis.

Air Traffic Safety: continued evolution or a new Paradigm.

The context here is Transport Risk Management. Is the philosophy of Air Traffic Safety different from other modes of transport? – yes, in many ways, it is. The focus is on Air Traffic Management (ATM), covering (eg) air traffic control and airspace structures, which is the part of the aviation system that is most likely to be developed through new paradigms. The primary goal of the ATM system is to control accident risk. ATM safety has improved over the decades for many reasons, from better equipment to additional safety defences. But ATM safety targets, improving on current performance, are now extremely demanding. What are the past and current methodologies for ATM risk assessment; and will they work effectively for the kinds of future systems that people are now imagining and planning? The title contrasts ‘Continued Evolution’ and a ‘New Paradigm’. How will system designers/operators assure safety with traffic growth and operational/technical changes that are more than continued evolution from the current system? What are the design implications for ‘new paradigms’, such as the USA’s ‘Next Generation Air Transportation System’ (NextGen) and Europe’s Single European Sky ATM Research Programme (SESAR)? Achieving and proving safety for NextGen and SESAR is an enormously tough challenge. For example, it will need to cover system resilience, human/automation issues, software/hardware performance/ground/air protection systems. There will be a need for confidence building programmes regarding system design/resilience, eg Human-in-the-Loop simulations with ‘seeded errors’

Air Traffic Management Safety Challenges

The primary goal of the Air Traffic Management (ATM) system is to control accident risk. ATM safety has improved over the decades for many reasons, from better equipment to additional safety defences. But ATM safety targets, improving on current performance, are now extremely demanding. Safety analysts and aviation decision-makers have to make safety assessments based on statistically incomplete evidence. If future risks cannot be estimated with precision, then how is safety to be assured with traffic growth and operational/technical changes? What are the design implications for the USA’s ‘Next Generation Air Transportation System’ (NextGen) and Europe’s Single European Sky ATM Research Programme (SESAR)? ATM accident precursors arise from (eg) pilot/controller workload, miscommunication, and lack of upto- date information. Can these accident precursors confidently be ‘designed out’ by (eg) better system knowledge across ATM participants, automatic safety checks, and machine rather than voice communication? Future potentially hazardous situations could be as ‘messy’ in system terms as the Überlingen mid-air collision. Are ATM safety regulation policies fit for purpose: is it more and more difficult to innovate, to introduce new technologies and novel operational concepts? Must regulators be more active, eg more inspections and monitoring of real operational and organisational practices

Real-time simulations to evaluate the RPAS integration in shared airspace

This paper presents the work done during the first year in the WP-E project ERAINT (Evaluation of the RPAS-ATM Interaction in Non-Segregated Airspace) that intends to evaluate by means of human-in-the-loop real-time simulations the interaction between a Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) and the Air Traffic Management (ATM) when a Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) is being operated in shared airspace. This interaction will be evaluated from three different perspectives. First, the separation management, its results are presented in this paper. Secondly, during the next year, the contingency management, also including loss of link situations and, lastly, the capacity impact of such operations in the overall ATM system. The used simulation infrastructure allows to simulate realistic exercises from both the RPAS Pilot-in-Command (PiC) and the Air Traffic Controller (ATCo) perspectives. Moreover, it permits to analyze the actual workload of the ATC and to evaluate several support tools and different RPAS levels of automation from the PiC and ATC sides. The simulation results and the usefulness of the support tools are presented for each selected concept of operations.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Exploratory Analysis of the Airspace Throughput and Sensitivities of an Urban Air Mobility System

The use of small, vertical-takeoff and landing aircraft to provide efficient, high-speed, ondemand passenger transportation within a metropolitan area (e.g. intra-city transportation) is a topic of increasing interest and investment within the aerospace and transportation communities. Preliminary, mostly vehicle-level analysis suggests that passenger-carrying Urban Air Mobility has the potential to provide meaningful door-to-door trip time savings compared to identical trips taken solely by automobile, even for relatively short trips of a few tens of miles. Subsequent analysis has shown that if such trips can be conducted at costs competitive with ground transportation, the demand for such flight operations, not surprisingly, becomes unprecedented by historical airspace operations counts, raising fundamental questions regarding feasibility, practicality, capacity and basic system attributes such as separation criteria. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary assessment of vertipad requirements and en route separation minima relative to the feasibility of large-scale urban aviation operations. This analysis is acknowledged as being far from comprehensive and is intended to help define the initial boundaries of an airspace system compatible with enabling high-volume operations

Adaptive Airborne Separation to Enable UAM Autonomy in Mixed Airspace

The excitement and promise generated by Urban Air Mobility (UAM) concepts have inspired both new entrants and large aerospace companies throughout the world to invest hundreds of millions in research and development of air vehicles, both piloted and unpiloted, to fulfill these dreams. The management and separation of all these new aircraft have received much less attention, however, and even though NASAs lead is advancing some promising concepts for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM), most operations today are limited to line of sight with the vehicle, airspace reservation and geofencing of individual flights. Various schemes have been proposed to control this new traffic, some modeled after conventional air traffic control and some proposing fully automatic management, either from a ground-based entity or carried out on board among the vehicles themselves. Previous work has examined vehicle-based traffic management in the very low altitude airspace within a metroplex called UTM airspace in which piloted traffic is rare. A management scheme was proposed in that work that takes advantage of the homogeneous nature of the traffic operating in UTM airspace. This paper expands that concept to include a traffic management plan usable at all altitudes desired for electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing urban and short-distance, inter-city transportation. The interactions with piloted aircraft operating under both visual and instrument flight rules are analyzed, and the role of Air Traffic Control services in the postulated mixed traffic environment is covered. Separation values that adapt to each type of traffic encounter are proposed, and the relationship between required airborne surveillance range and closure speed is given. Finally, realistic scenarios are presented illustrating how this concept can reliably handle the density and traffic mix that fully implemented and successful UAM operations would entail

Relationship between Air Traffic Demand, Safety and Complexity in High-Density Airspace in Europe

Air traffic performance of the European air traffic system depends not only on traffic demand but also on airspace structure and its traffic distribution. These structural (airspace structure) and flow characteristics (factors such as traffic volume, climbing/descending traffic, mix of aircraft type, military area activity) influence airspace complexity, which can affect controller workload and influence the probability of safety occurrence. In other words, all these dynamic and static complexity components can potentially have an impact upon the safety of the air traffic management (ATM) system. Having in mind fluctuation in traffic on daily, seasonal or annual level in certain airspace, a few questions arise: How changes in traffic demand influence complexity and conflict risk? Is there any correlation between traffic demand, conflict risk and complexity? and Are there any differences between seasons? For that purpose, an investigation is performed on FAB Europe Central (FABEC) airspace, based on 2 weeks of operated traffic during the summer and fall of 2017. Air traffic complexity is estimated using the EUROCONTROL complexity metrics, while conflict risk is assessed using the conflict risk assessment simulation tool. Results show that certain positive relationship exists between traffic demand, conflict risk and complexity