Strategic Conflict Detection and Resolution Using Aircraft Intent Information

Abstract

A number of automated decision support tools will be required in the future air traffic management system to enable continued provision of safe and efficient services in increasingly congested skies. In particular, Conflict Detection and Resolution (CDR) tools should allow for early detection of possible conflicts and propose safe and efficient resolution manoeuvres to avoid loss of separation. However, current approaches in the open literature not only use different levels of aircraft intent information but also make a number of assumptions on models of aircraft motion. Furthermore, information relevant to aircraft performance is often not considered with the consequence of the resulting resolution strategies being potentially unreliable. This paper presents an enhanced, strategic, pairwise, performance-based and distributed CDR algorithm. It accounts for the weaknesses of current approaches by using the maximum level of aircraft intent information together with a novel trajectory prediction model. Numerical results for representative conflict scenarios show that the proposed CDR method is able to generate conflict-free trajectories for participating aircraft while taking into account the actual aircraft capabilities to perform the recommended resolution manoeuvres.