A Demonstration of an Aircraft Intent Interchangespecification for Facilitating Trajectory-Based Operations inthe National Airspace System

摘要

International research into Air Traffic Management technologies has accelerated over the last ten years. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and EUROCONTROL each have on-going research in Trajectory-Based Management in their efforts to decrease Air Traffic Controller workload while increasing air traffic capacity and reducing the effects of adverse weather conditions and bottleneck areas. Additionally, each of these organizations has interest in standardizing developing technologies. Towards this end, the FAA and the Boeing Company have established a Cooperative Research & Development Agreement designed to facilitate development in Trajectory-Based Operations. To initiate this cooperative research, the Target Generation Facility (TGF) of the FAA William J. Hughes Technical Center has conducted concept demonstration research of a promising specification standard: the Aircraft Intent Description Language (AIDL), developed by Boeing Research & Technology Europe. AIDL is a formal language for the unambiguous definition of aircraft trajectories. It is intended as a univocal, rigorous, and standardized manner to interchange aircraft intent information for ATM purposes. The purpose of the TGF research was to demonstrate the concept that AIDL can be used to interchange aircraft intent information to a trajectory predictor and to an aircraft simulator and that the resultant predicted and simulated trajectories would be compatible. This study used the TGF Trajectory Predictor (TP) and the TGF Simulator. An interface compatible with AIDL was developed for each. The results of this study show that AIDL can be used to efficiently and completely define an aircraft trajectory, can be used to interchange aircraft intent information, and will result in compatible trajectories in a TP and a flight simulator.