No abstract

No abstract

One of the most interesting challenges of the next few years will be airspace system automation. This process will involve different aspects such as air traffic management, aircraft and airport operations and guidance and navigation systems. The use of unmanned aerial systems for civil missions will be one of the most important steps in this automation process. In this article, an air traffic management oriented conflict detection & resolution algorithm that models air traffic management operative technique as avoidance manoeuvres in order to self-separate the unmanned aerial vehicle from piloted air traffic is presented. As a first step, a geometric analysis identifies all possible unmanned aerial vehicle routes among the mission targets and related potential conflicts with piloted air traffic. For each potential conflict, air traffic management operative techniques are used to model different options of conflict resolution: vertical and horizontal avoidance, speed regulation, holding patterns and rerouting. The performances of a reference unmanned aerial vehicle are used to estimate the cost of each possible sub-route and, in case of conflict, the cost of each possible avoidance manoeuvre. In this way, the unmanned aerial vehicle mission is modelled as a combinatorial optimization problem that concerns the sequencing of both targets and conflict resolution options. As output, a conflict free route that minimizes the air traffic impact over the mission is provided. Simulation results over real air traffic data show how this approach could be useful for future common management of piloted and non-piloted air traffic.

No abstract

One of the major problems faced by the growth of air traffic in the last decade is the limited capacity of the runway especially during low visibility procedures (LVP) due to fog and bad weather. To solve this issue, the project "Resilient Synthetic Vision for Advanced Control Tower Air Navigation Service Provision" (RETINA) project, a two-years exploratory research project, under SESAR2020 program, proposes to use new Synthetic Vision (SV) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies for the tower controllers to allow them to conduct safe operations under any Meteorological Conditions while maintaining a high runway throughput, equal to good visibility. In this paper we introduce the Ecological Interface Design (EID) as a methodology to investigate the potential and applicability of SV tools and Virtual/Augmented Reality (V/AR) display techniques for the Air Traffic Control (ATC) service provision by the airport control tower. We explain how the EID framework can be used in RETINA, we experiment the framework on a suitable airport and we provide the EID results comparing normal and LVP conditions with operations using RETINA technologies.