Downlink Aircraft Parameter-Based High-Accuracy Tracking System for Air Traffic Surveillance

Abstract

With the rapid increase in air traffic demands, the more accurate and reliable tracking systems for aircraft surveillance are required to improve the capacity, safety, and efficiency of air traffic control (ATC) services. As a suboptimal hybrid filter, the Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) estimator has been applied in the practical aircraft tracking systems. However, it is difficult for the standard IMM filter to precisely estimate the aircraft state when the target is maneuvering since the detection of maneuvers is often delayed by the response of Kalman filters. On the other hand, in the Mode S radar Enhanced Surveillance (EHS), the downlink aircraft parameters (DAPs) are available for obtaining the updated states of aircraft; however, this information of aircraft parameters has not been used systematically to improve the performance of current tracking systems. In this paper, a DAPs-based tracking system which is able to dynamically revise the mode probabilities of the IMM estimator according to the real-time change in the aircraft motion is proposed. The results of computer simulations and practical experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed system by comparing it with the standard IMM-based tracking system.