Automated Separation Assurance with Weather and Uncertainty

摘要

There are three major components to automating the tasks of air-traffic controllers: resolving aircraft-to-aircraft conflicts, providing arrival scheduling, and helping to ensure that aircraft remain clear of severe weather. The Advanced Airspace Concept provides functionalities to address all three of these components in an integrated fashion and provides redundant systems to handle uncertainties and failures. This paper discusses recent enhancements to components of this system to efficiently handle complex weather environments and to reduce the effect of aircraft performance uncertainties. The weather avoidance functionality incorporates an understanding of aircraft operations by limiting the complexity of the proposed solutions. To capture this understanding, the algorithm uses geometric calculations instead of a grid-based approach. Current research using this new functionality is discussed. Also discussed are methods to increase the robustness of the system to unavoidable differences between predicted aircraft trajectories and the trajectories that are actually flown.